TINY PIECES OF FLESH

By Paul Gray

Since there no longer seems to be such a thing as bad publicity, Lorenzo Carcaterra's Sleepers (Ballantine; 404 pages; $23) can be deemed a resounding success even before it hits the best-seller lists. Not only has Hollywood paid $2.1 million for the film rights. Better yet, Carcaterra's self-described "true story" has prompted newspaper articles containing charges that parts or all of the book are simply the author's inventions.

Some of these suspicions arise naturally from Carcaterra's incredible first-person tale. He and his three best friends, so he says in the book, grow up in Hell's Kitchen, a working-class neighborhood on the West Side of midtown Manhattan. An adolescent prank in the summer of 1967 goes terribly amiss and causes serious injury to an elderly man. As a result, the four friends are sent to an upstate New York correctional facility for boys, where they are repeatedly raped, beaten and tortured, physically and mentally, by four sadistic guards.

Carcaterra then jumps forward a decade or so. He has become an aspiring journalist, and his friend Michael is now an assistant district attorney. Tommy and John, hardened by their abuse in confinement, are hired gunmen. One night, in a Hell's Kitchen restaurant, the two spot one of the guards who tormented them and shoot him dead, in full view of other patrons. After their arrest, Michael persuades the D.A.'s office to let him try the case. His superiors, of course, know nothing about his lifelong friendship with the defendants, and Michael does not tell them he plans intentionally to lose the case. Which he does, with the crucial help of a Roman Catholic priest from the old neighborhood, who perjures himself on the witness stand and provides an alibi for Tommy and John on the night of the murder.

Carcaterra seems surprised that anyone would doubt that all this actually happened to him and his friends. "It's hurtful, in truth," he says. "When some people with nothing but their own opinions don't believe it, there is little you can do to combat them." At the same time, the author admits that nearly all the details in Sleepers are fictitious, intentionally altered to disguise his friends -- only the one he calls Michael, he says, is still living -- and Hell's Kitchen sources. "You have to change dates, names, places, people. The way they looked; you have to make them look a different way. If it happened here, you make it happen there. Because I have something to hide: the identities of these people."

The author thus dismisses objections from the Manhattan D.A.'s office that Michael, with only six months' experience there, could never have been assigned to a homicide case. Such nitpickers are missing the point. In reality, as opposed to the book, Michael was not a six-month assistant D.A., Carcaterra says, and he was not necessarily working in Manhattan either. "The what, where and when these things happened," he insists, "were not as important to me as the fact that they did happen."

Not since Joe McGinniss began dreaming up things that Senator Edward M. Kennedy might have thought, in The Last Brother (1993), has there been such an elastic and accommodating definition of nonfiction as Carcaterra's. Truth matters, but it has nothing to do with petty details. An author who wanted to write about the Yalta Conference, say, but not about Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, would remain equally true to the topic by naming the principals Larry, Curly and Moe and placing them in a Tijuana saloon.

The problem with Sleepers is not that the plot is inherently hard to believe; it's that Carcaterra's prose manages to make it seem preposterous. Here, for example, is a description of a football game between the guards and inmates at the correctional facility: "The two front lines banged at each other hard, blood, saliva and tiny pieces of flesh flying through the air." The watching crowd of upstate locals "sat stunned into eerie silence, stilled by the sight of a field filled with red-tinged grass. The spectators were left with little else to do but watch the drama play itself out."

That's pretty much the reaction provoked by a reading of Sleepers. Internal contradictions pile up. "We followed every pro sport with religious fervor and adolescent passion," Carcaterra writes on one page. On the next: "We cared little for Knicks basketball and barely tolerated Giants football." The author writes emotionally of a Greek hot-dog vendor he and his friends robbed: "We never saw the tiny, airless fourth-floor room he lived in, a 40-minute walk from his station, its only comfort a tattered collection of pictures from home, crudely taped to the wall nearest the worn mattress of his bed. We never saw the hot stove, topped by empty cans of Campbell's pork and beans."

That is an awful lot of information about a room Carcaterra never saw. How did he obtain it? Well, the author says, details about the vendor were invented. "Is he Greek? Maybe. Is he Hispanic? Could be, whatever." No. "Whatever" won't do as the ruling principle of a book that purports to tell the truth.

--With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York