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D’Agata wrote an essay full of fabrications that he believed sounded more like Truth than the truth. Fingal was assigned to check D’Agata’s facts…
from the New York Times Book Review:
From D’Agata’s first sentence, which says that at the time of Levi’s death there were “34 licensed strip clubs in Vegas,” Fingal detects trouble. D’Agata has supplied The Believer with a source suggesting the city had just 31 such clubs. Fingal asks D’Agata how he arrived at “34.” D’Agata replies in dubious fashion: “Because the rhythm of ‘34’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘31.’”
The discrepancies mount. The “Boston Saloon” becomes the “Bucket of Blood” because “ ‘Bucket of Blood’ is more interesting.” The name of Levi’s school is changed because the original is “too clunky. It has a comma in it; that’s ridiculous.” “Tweety Nails” becomes “Famous Nails” — a real mystery, for with a too-good-to-be-true name like “Tweety Nails,” why tweak it? A fleet of dog-grooming vans described in D’Agata’s notes as “pink” become “purple,” because “I needed the two beats in ‘purple.’ ”
Minor fibs? Maybe. But other fabrications are decidedly not. Another suicide-by-fall that occurred on the same day as Levi’s is transformed into a suicide-by-hanging, “because I wanted Levi’s death to be the only one from falling that day. I wanted his death to be more unique.”
