Fraud

A transplanted Canadian Jew of modest intelligence and an eye for frailty and cant.
Vacationing in rural New Hampshire prompts David Rakoff to observe, “The central drama of my life is actually about being lonely and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play.” In this collection of fifteen essays, Rakoff positions himself as the ultimate fifth columnist, a transplanted Canadian Jew of modest intelligence and an eye for frailty and cant, who worms his way into philosophical muddles and geographical oddities: visiting Iceland for a story on the mythic Hidden People; interviewing attendees at a New Age seminar whose guest of honor is noted Tibetan studies expert Steven Seagal; puzzling over the fate of four earnest Austrian teachers recruited to teach in New York City’s public school system.

Rakoff’s conceit isn’t subtle: by pretending to be a party to these various phenomena, he exposes the fraudulence of their believers, mostly by indicting them with their jargon and horrifying sincerity. A shame that he picks such easy targets. As for tone — essential when writing ostensibly funny essays — it conjoins what Rakoff noted in an unexpectedly lucid essay written by a Hidden People defender: a fascinating mixture of weary exasperation and respect for the feelings of others, of which Rakoff himself gives a decent rendition in his narration. The listener doesn’t need to be told that a large percentage of these essays appeared as entries in NPR’s This American Life; it’s there in Rakoff’s attitude towards these rural and foreign rubes, who come off more winningly than their interlocutor. Only the last essay hints at some kind of solidarity between subject and author.