Mezrich Spins Facebook Potboiler

On July 14, a season ahead of schedule, Doubleday will flood bookstores with copies of The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich's exposé on the social-networking giant Facebook. Hype around the book has been building since well before the 40-year-old Back Bay bon vivant started writing in earnest. Last spring, after Mezrich scored a $1.9 million advance for the project—and promptly sold the film rights to Scott Rudin, who has The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin already at work on the script—a copy of the proposal he'd circulated leaked to the tech blog Valleywag. "This is the exclusive, true story that you won't read anywhere else," Mezrich wrote in the proposal, which contained all the author's familiar tropes: Sex! Money! Genius! Betrayal! (Indeed, each of those words appears in the book's subtitle.) In one scene in the proposal, the girlfriend of Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin sets his dorm room on fire in a jealous rage after learning he's been cavorting with a Victoria's Secret model. Another vignette, set in 2004, depicts Saverin and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg feasting on koala meat on a yacht owned by the CEO of Sun Microsystems.

Notwithstanding those salacious details, the bigger intrigue has centered on Mezrich himself. Since his 2002 page-turner, Bringing Down the House, about a group of MIT geeks who win a small fortune counting cards in Las Vegas, he has cornered the market on tales of overeducated world-beaters. That book, the former novelist's first foray into reporting, spent over a year on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. It was followed by three more with similar plot lines. All were sold as remarkable "true stories."

In fact, as we now know, Mezrich gives readers "truthy." Last year, as Bringing Down the House hit theaters as Kevin Spacey's 21, Mezrich copped to rearranging details and creating composite characters for the book, stirring a controversy he dismisses with a touch of annoyance. "There are different forms of nonfiction. My books are nonfiction," he says. Mezrich writes fast-paced romps that sell by the pallet, and if the literary world is semantically ill equipped to categorize his oeuvre, well, that's not his problem. Or at least, it hasn't been so far.

With The Accidental Billionaires, Mezrich is for the first time dealing with readily fact-checkable material, in a story about a big, ballyhooed company. Tackling Facebook's creation, in other words, is a big step up from chronicling anonymous MIT card counters. Since he's covering a topic that's already been picked over by packs of journalists, he won't hook readers by rehashing old reporting; the challenge he sets for himself is in revealing new truths—a tall order with Facebook, which has always kept a buttoned-up profile while battling a slew of lawsuits. Indeed, attorneys for Zuckerberg and his many foes have spent years in court sweating the kinds of details Mezrich usually likes to gloss over or embellish.