Reviews
The parallels with Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley are not lost on Kirn, who spends as much time trying to understand how he and others fell under Gerhartstreiter’s spell as he does relating the primary tale of the criminal himself. Kirn’s candor, ear for dialogue, and crisp prose make for a masterful true crime narrative that is impossible to put down. The book deserves to become a classic.
One of the most honest, compelling and strangest books about the relationship between a writer and his subject ever penned by an American scribe… Each new revelation comes subtly, and each adds to the pathetic and creepy portrait of Clark Rockefeller as a vacuous manipulator… The ending of Blood Will Out is at once deeply ambiguous and deeply satisfying. By then, Kirn has looked into the eyes of a cruel, empty man—and learned a lot about himself in the process.
At the time it surfaced, Rockefeller’s story was widely covered by the media, but that should not prevent anyone familiar with its facts from reading Kirn’s haunting account…Kirn’s voice throughout is witty and sharp. His canny, deceptively casual organization of the narrative heightens suspense, and the words and images in his flowing prose cut like laser beams….For its devastating, unsettling psychological insights and its rich, polished writing, “Blood Will Out” equals Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” as a nonfiction novel of crime.
Walter Kirn’s “Blood Will Out” has a subtitle that bills it as “The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade.” It’s got all those things, but it is primarily a tale of seduction…[a] tight, gripping book…”
Kirn is such a good writer and Gerhartsreiter such a baroquely, demonically colorful subject, you could imagine this being a fine read had they no personal connection. That they did, however, elevates Blood Will Out to another level: Kirn lards his story with detail while reviewing his own psyche, in an attempt to discover how he—a journalist!—could have been so fooled. The irony? With all due respect to Kirn’s skills as a novelist, it is hard to conceive of any fictionalized version of ”Clark Rockefeller” being as compelling as the real thing.
Riveting and disturbing, Blood Will Out is a mélange of memoir, stranger-than-fiction crime reporting and cultural critique. The literary markers run the gamut from James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, and Fyodor Doestoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley trilogy and Strangers on a Train. Kirn’s self-lacerating meditations on class, art, vanity, ambition, betrayal and delusion elevate the material beyond its pulpy core… Kirn’s belated acceptance of reality provides the most fascinating and frustrating element of this engaging, self-flagellating memoir.
The story of Blood Will Out is one of cosmic ironies and jaw-dropping reversals. What makes Blood Will Out so absorbing is its teller more than its subject. Kirn’s persona is captivating—funny, pissed off, highly literate, and self-searching. He’s also an elegant, classic writer… Add the highly readable, intricately told Blood Will Out to the list of great books about the dizzying tensions of the writing life and the maddening difficulty of getting at the truth.
[A] fascinating account of the imposter he considered his friend for 10 years. Blood Will Out is an exploration of a hoaxer from the point of view of a mark, and of a relationship based on interlocking deceptions and self-deceptions. The result is a moral tale about the dangers of social climbing on a rickety ladder—for both those trying to scramble up the rungs and those trying to hold it steady below.
Blood Will Out” does a good job of describing the lives of this strange man…but its deeper concern is autobiographical. What made [Kirn] susceptible to Rockefeller’s lies? How was his own, rebetol online reflected by his friend’s outrageous one? The answers make for a haunting, pained and terrifically engaging self-interrogation. Kirn’s tone of middle-aged self-reckoning is unquestionably heartfelt. That’s what makes great memoirs — which this one is — so interesting: They’re at once authentic and performative.
In this smart, real-life psychological thriller, the fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald…