As Hamlet would say, look here upon this picture and on this: two young men, both in their thirties, both white, both good-looking in generic kinds of ways, both intelligent, both multi-millionaires, both objects of interviews in a recent issue of New York magazine – and both, on the surface of those interviews, raging douchebags (admittedly not a Shakespearean term, although one likes to think he’d have taken to it).

The first is by Boris Kachka: it’s an interview/profile kind of piece about Garth Risk Hallberg, whose debut novel City on Fire made ripples in the frog-pond of the literary world by netting him squintillions in its sale-price. The piece, oddly titled “The Unprecedented Garth Risk Hallberg,” seems to go out of its way to portray our debut author as just the kind of garrulous, self-absorbed douchebag you’d expect to be the recipient of such outrageous good fortune as selling a first novel for more than Eudora Welty earned in her entire career (let’s call it the Justin Cronin Template). Kachka meets Hallberg in a series of trendy eateries (all outdoors despite the withering heat, of course – the de rigueur requirement of all famous young tobacco addicts) and chronicles Hallberg’s various monologue-style answers to routine questions – routine questions that still sometimes manage to irritate, it seems:

The music was blaring from a speaker mounted on a passing bicycle. “I want that for my bike, that’s awesome,” he said, a toothy grin breaking his middle-distance stare. But it didn’t throw his conversation off course; not much can. “Hold that thought,” he’ll say to an interjected question, just barely flashing impatience before rolling into his next subject.

Hallberg’s old buddies don’t exactly do him any favors in the douchebag sweepstakes (there’s a picture from 1997 at what we can charitably hope was Peak Douchery for all of them, grouped together, armored in fifteen trendy layers, helmeted in thick woolen caps, all so visibly proud of how much and how seriously they smoke), painting a picture of him as boringly anti-modern; “He still owns a tiny flip phone,” we’re told, “and he guards his time, attention, and privacy by burrowing into what one friend calls a ‘pre-connected universe.’” At one point Hallberg even seems to teeter on the brink of committing the very worst offense of which such a supremely lucky person can be guilty: at one point he almost says he had it coming. He flirts very briefly out loud with the idea that if you take his squintillion-dollar payday and factor it backwards, over the years he spent writing, and you work out the hourly rate, you’ll see that a cold draft for a squintillion dollars is really, when you do the math, nothing more than what he deser – but then he stops himself and pulls himself back from that unforgivable blasphemy.

The article quite inadvertently leaves us with the impression of a Franzen-in-training, yet another young (ish) novelist who trendily scorns modernity, has self-importance coming out his pores like a thin ooze, and thinks he deserves fame.

And if such was the parting impression of that first interview, it was the starting impression of Kyle Buchanan’s brief interview with former Spider-Man star Andrew Garfield elsewhere in the issue. In that interview, Garfield starts complaining before he’s even taken a seat: “Coming in today to do interviews, I’m like, Why? I know that I’m an actor and it’s part of the job, and I feel lucky I get to do that, but it’s such a weird thing. What do I have to say?”

Never a promising start, of course, when a petulant little tobacco addict movie star pretends he’s mystified by the whole publicity apparatus in which he’s spent the previous ten years of his life (apart from five-month vacations in Ibiza, that is). It tends to mean the star in question is feeling extra tetchy and intends to take it out on the interviewer. Buchanan, ever the professional, attempts to ease things by spinning out a line of interview-friendly patter about Garfield’s upcoming movie. But all this does is provoke the star:

For me, it was very articulate. You fucking said it. Hearing you talk, I just suddenly feel like my head is wrapped in cellophane. Why don’t you just do this interview? You’re saying the right shit.

To which Buchanan replies, “I don’t think my editors would appreciate it if I wrote only, ‘Andrew Garfield nods periodically.’” – to which the star replies without missing a beat, “Just attribute what you’re saying to me.”

The interview continues for a few more questions, and Garfield eventually snaps into the routine and starts spewing the kind of autopilot patter he knows perfectly well is part of his job. But the short piece leaves the impression of an entitled young (ish) snot who’s got the nerve to complain in the midst of more sheer good fortune than some entire countries experience in a century – a douchebag, in other words.

And yet, these two pictures are not alike! They are in fact, despite appearances, like unto Hyperion and a satyr! The odd drifts and sub-currents of that Boris Kachka piece notwithstanding (although I swear, if I hear one more artiste imply that they need complete silence and a cabin in the Poconos before they can write a line of English prose, I’m going to plotz), Garth Risk Hallberg is neither a douchebag – he’s actually very nice, ungainly, thoughtful person – nor, more importantly, overrated – City on Fire is an incredible work of fiction, as capacious as the indie-darling An Infinite Jest but enormously better written. Kachka’s interview, with its chi-chi hangouts and its waffles, gets ever so slightly more douchey as it progresses, and yet its subject isn’t a douchebag at all. Whereas after its bumpy start, Buchanan’s interview with Andrew Garfield becomes slightly less douchey as it goes along, despite the fact that its subject is indeed a raging douchebag, a talentless, banal, whinging mannequin who should be modeling Fall sweaters in the latest J. Crew catalogue instead of being oh-so-imposed-upon to give yet another interview to the fawning media.

So let that be a lesson to us all: never judge a douchebag by his cover (story)! Instead, let us all respond in the only fitting ways: by boycotting the wretchedly pompous Andrew Garfield, and by rushing out to your favorite Williamsburg tobacconist to buy a copy of City on Fire!