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While Newsweek officially won first prize in the O.J. book race, publishing paraphrases of excerpts from O.J. Simpson's infamous (and now-defunct) tell-all last week, Vanity Fair now claims the honor of being the first to get its hands on the entire book, recalled in November after its publicity stunt imploded. The magazine's website features an exclusive online review by James Wolcott of the ghost-written pseudo-memoir, which he calls a "shameless yet ingeniously opaque cockteaser of a cash-in confessional" and compares to the "glassy stare" of Sunset Boulevard. Wolcott describes chapters like "The Two Nicoles," noting the former football star's self-depiction as a passive hostage to his wife's mercurial moods, and of course the now-infamous "The Night in Question," described by Wolcott as "the memoir's money shot--the reconstruction of the double homicide as siphoned through Simpson's hazy recall and his ghostwriter's novelettish imagination." But with all the sound and fury surrounding the chapter comes, ultimately, not much, and Wolcott sums up the book's dissolute murder scene with the following:
Even as a possible killer, the O.J. Simpson of If I Did It is presented as a befuddled bystander, a puppet with broken strings, a fool in a fog. He's a bystander even with his own supposed book, disavowing "The Night in Question" as something slid into place by the publisher and ghostwriter for commercial reasons, thereby sloughing off responsibility for what would have gone out under his name had the project not been aborted pre-launch after the public and media outcry.
Now, amid multiple lawsuits brewing and publishing titans toppling, we're left with a few bad reviews of some decidedly-mediocre writing. Still, the book itself may provide just enough additional fodder to tide us over, at least until O.J.'s next one is published.
