My one thought throughout reading Kevin Young’s nonfiction book on the history of the American hoax, Bunk, was what his take would be on the Jussie Smollet case from earlier this year and how that would fit into his narrative. I will try to remain politically neutral and judge this book on its literary merits, but with something so caustic it is a little hard to avoid such discussion. I won’t go as far as to say that throughout the books 450 pages (and more than a 100 more of notes and index) that Young seems obsessed with the idea of the hoax as another tool of white supremacy, but he does so at the cost of a few other interesting ideas he could have covered. Throughout the book, whether he is discussing P. T. Barnum, the godfather of the American hoax, the many cases of him putting non-whites on display such as Joice Heth, George Washington’s 161 year old nurse or the first ever “moon landing” in the 1830s, he never tries to explain why these hoaxes were believed, putting the blame entirely on the perpetrator and never on the public who wholly bought into it. It sounds harsh but at times his got to answer seems to simply be racism (but then again, that might just be what this books is and I might as well be complaining that their isn’t enough cake recipes). But amongst the activism, there are some good sections, such as the one of fake memoirs where he talks about how James Frey and J. T. Leroy crafted fake stories (and in Leroy’s case, fake authors) to great success. But overall, the book is a little long and quite repetitive, with an eye roller of a coda where you know who is talked about with typically unoriginality. There is an interesting idea here in the history and psychology of the hoax, but again, I do not think that was the book Young was trying to write.
Rating: 3/5
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