MacDonald's uninterestingness is not unusual at all ... When a journalist fetches up against someone like , all he can do is flee and hope that a more suitable subject will turn up soon. In the MacDonald-McGinniss case we have an instance of a journalist who apparently found out too late that the subject of his book was not up to scratch — not a member of the wonderful race of auto-fictionalizers, like Joseph Mitchell's Joe Gould and Truman Capote's Perry Smith, on whom the "non-fiction novel" depends for its life ... The solution that McGinniss arrived at for dealing with MacDonald's characterlessness was not a satisfactory one, but it had to do.