Books of 2013: Lawrence Wright's Going Clear

While Going Clear makes an excellent case for the value of scholarship and journalism, it's easy to think of it as a blemished thing, to shrug it off as a trunk full of sordid, sleazy truth--a pricier and better written string of trashy trivia about one of the most successful crackpots of all time and all the tin plated crackpots that have followed in his wake, codifying his crazy into code, and, through the most successful act of American espionage (not committed by the American government) of the last 200 years, created one of the most financially powerful cults the world has ever seen. And to a certain degree, that criticism is true--while Lawrence Wright's writing will keep one moving through the book, it is the lurid nature of his subject that will make that movement so anxious, so hysterical. L Ron Hubbard fired torpedos and threw mines from a Naval tugboat at imaginary Japanese invaders, and years later, 40-something businessmen choose to run in a circle around a telephone pole in the desert to the point that their teeth fall out, all so that they can escape the psychic chains of a fantastical alien emprisonment..there's no way to guess in advance what someone's favorite piece of trivia this book will fire into one's mind, but there is no doubt that some of it will, and once lodged, will serve as a lifelong chunk of immediate conversation fodder when emergency strikes. (What did I end up talking to my wife's doula about when labor crested the 40 hour mark and none of us could be serious anymore? You guess it: the weird shit that we read about in this book.)

And yet there is something important that happens here. As Wright so accurately points out in the beginning of the book, there's an abudance of subjective research on Scientology out there, but there's a dearth of the other kind, and writing about the subject as extensively as he chose to required him to do as much heavy lifting as he did on Looming Tower. That's not to blame those reporters who came before Wright too harshly; in large part, the machinery leveled against them would've made maniacs of the best of us. But a book like this has been promised for a long time, and it isn't a betrayal of those who suffered at the hands of "Fair Game" to canonize Wright for finally realizing the thing.

Drunkenly compelling prose and well-researched to boot: there's not much else one could ask for when you're in this section of the bookstore. That's what makes Wright's final pages legitimately wonderful, as you watch him work his way through his disgust with the intellectual cowardice of celebrities, the exhaustion with which he patiently walks one through the way that money allows those at the top to humiliate, degrade and destroy the lives of those at the bottom, punctuated with a neat display of fury. It's almost unfair--he's entertained you for so long, and there's little indication the depths of empathy his final message expects--but that's the only way a message as deeply humanistic as his would have ever gotten across. If you want a gossiphound to care, then you better sneak that request in the back door.

-Tucker Stone, 2013

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Comments

[Jeppe]

Good review, Tucker! I just finished the book and pretty much agree with your assessment, even if my tolerance for the seemingly endless stories of Tom Cruise's extravagance was a bit more limited.