Have you ever fibbed your age? How about where you’re from? Of course there’s no harm in doing this, but where’s the point at which the little lies you tell become a giant fabrication?

“The Runner,” the highly enjoyable debut book of David J. Samuels ’89, directly confronts this question, delving into the twisted world of Jim Hogue, the Ivy League’s most famous conman. Assuming and shedding identities the way one might try on a pair of jeans, Hogue successfully parlayed his way into one of the country’s most highly esteemed universities and the homes of some of the wealthiest Americans, before eventually being caught and sentenced to a cell block in Arizona.

In 1988, Hogue enrolled at Princeton as a self-taught ranch hand from Utah named Alexi Indris-Santana. While at Princeton, Hogue excelled at track, obtained outstanding grades, and joined the elite Ivy Club. However, Hogue had already done time in jail—in fact, had deferred his acceptance for a year because of it—and had falsified his SATs and high school grades. Princeton had been taken in by a huge scam.

Samuels artfully blends firsthand accounts, multiple documents, and personal observation to reveal that Hogue is not your average identity thief. While Hogue is a man who is deeply disturbed, compelled to lie and steal from anyone he could possibly rip off, Samuels carefully peels back the superficial labels of liar and fraud to discover a complicated individual. While in custody after being arrested at Princeton University, Hogue reveals his rationale for such extraordinary lies, a desire anyone can relate to: “I wanted to start all over again, without the burdens of my past.”

And it is with this statement, a profoundly American sentiment, that “The Runner” gets complicated. Isn’t it part of American values to be self-made? Aren’t people fibbing and embellishing their own accomplishments all around us all of the time? So where does a person draw the line between creating a persona and outright lying? These questions that Samuels raises are not easily answered and Samuels doggedly pursues them throughout his reconstruction of Hogue’s story. Samuels has no fear presenting the darker aspects of our culture to us, declaring, “Christmas is a child’s first introduction to lying”—a curious, but certainly valid, take on a favorite American holiday.

Along with the myth of the self-made man, Samuels examines the personal responsibility of those who believed Hogue’s lies. Essential to Hogue’s success—along with his gift to run incredibly fast for incredibly long distances—was his ability to play on the desires of everyone around him; he “made himself into a screen on which people could project their hopes and dreams.” To what extent does Hogue deserve the blame and to what extent the willingness of society to believe his lies?

Not escaping from this apportioning of blame is the Princeton application committee. Samuels is highly skeptical of the competence of application and admissions process of Ivy League universities. Flipping through Hogue’s falsified application, Samuels writes, “I was reminded again of how little connection the Ivy League selection process has to the ability or the inclination to endure the rigors of high-level academic work.” For an Ivy League student, this sharp criticism is a reminder of the fortuitous nature of one’s presence on campus.

Samuels takes Hogue’s deceits as a point of departure for acute self-reflection on his own profession, scrutinizing journalism in light of Hogue’s actions: “While it is facile to equate journalism with lying, it is also true that both actions share in common an unpleasantly instrumental approach to people and language that diminishes the common store of trust. The subject has no power to alter a reporter’s approach to his or her subject, or to take back a single word that they said.”

Told in Samuels’s clean and direct style, “The Runner” manages to find reflected in a sociopath many of the tendencies of American society at large. The account raises questions about many of this country’s principles and institutions that linger long after the book is put down. By presenting Hogue in all of his complexity, as a human and not just a criminal, Samuels gives no easy answers.

—Staff writer Katherine L. Miller can be reached at kmiller@fas.harvard.edu.