What’s the difference between something going viral and a storm in a teacup? Not an awful lot, it often seems to me. Last week, everyone in publishing and quite a lot of people in the media were talking – I mean online, although presumably their offices were also ablaze with the subject, indignation rising from their desks like smoke – about a profile in the New Yorker.

In the piece, it was revealed that Dan Mallory, aka AJ Finn, author of the bestselling thriller The Woman at the Window, is a fantasist who has told an awful lot of lies: a series of grandiose and frequently ghastly deceptions that, according to some, may have helped his extraordinarily successful career in the book trade. (Before he was a writer, he was a highly paid editor, most recently at William Morrow in New York.)

In case you missed the whole fantastical kerfuffle, let me briefly recap. Mallory is a Waspy, 39-year-old American with a chiselled jaw and a million-dollar deal for the movie adaptation of his novel and whose elaborate fabrications, according to the New Yorker, include his own terminal brain cancer, the death of his parents, his brother’s suicide, his two doctorates and, on one occasion, dogsitting (not even the line about the dog turned out to be true; during a telephone conversation with his bosses, Mallory apparently tried to prove its existence by hammily shouting: “No! Get down!”).

No wonder, then, that on social media his unmasking provoked plenty of exaggerated eye-rolling and, seemingly within minutes, a spoof Dan Mallory Twitter account. The whole thing was so juicy. Such bonhomie, however, didn’t last long. Pretty soon, it was replaced with something much less enjoyable – an implacable self-righteousness that put an end not only to the jokes, but also to the possibility of explanation and inquiry.

I’m not here to defend Mallory. He shouldn’t have behaved as he did and the statement he has since issued in which, in effect, he begs for a free pass for his misdeeds on account of the fact that he has bipolar disorder is risible; such a diagnosis cannot account for his behaviour. Nor am I going to come over all saintly and deny that I am as prone to schadenfreude and envy as the next writer, although it has to be said that the more I read of Ian Parker’s New Yorker profile, which is 12,000 words long, the more it seemed to me to resemble a cosmic sledgehammer and Mallory a tiny hazelnut.

Nevertheless, I find myself amazed by the response of the wider publishing world to the revelations about him. How bizarre that people see his inexorable rise, and the untruths on which it was based, only in political terms – as an indictment of the way publishing treats women and people of colour, who simply do not rise as high as white men – rather than as an example, too, of human folly and frailty. Such folly and frailty, by the way, applies to those who fell for him as much as to Mallory himself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In her short story, Now More Than Ever, Zadie Smith wrote: ‘I instinctively sympathise with the guilty.’ Photograph: Brian Dowling/Getty Images

It is bewildering to me that people who essentially make their living from the telling of stories should be moved to such grim piety at this real-life narrative: more angry than fascinated; blank condemnation where there should be curiosity. We know very well that the virtual mob likes nothing more than to “cancel” those whom it regards as having transgressed, whether in word or deed. But to see publishers heading in this direction, when nuance and complexity, drama and strangeness should be their very lifeblood, strikes me as both disheartening and not a little chilling.

But then, my instincts tend more in the direction of the narrator of Zadie Smith’s recent story about our present moment, Now More Than Ever. I have an urge to understand those who are deemed “beyond the pale” (whatever that means: the accused, these days, rarely are). As she puts it: “I instinctively sympathise with the guilty. That’s my guilty secret.”

I don’t know what, if anything, is wrong with Mallory. It may be that he is, to use an old-fashioned word, mad. Or it may be that he is simply bad. More likely, it is a combination of things. In truth, it’s difficult to separate him from the wider literary culture in which he operated: a culture in which writers, whatever their sensibility or suitability, are expected to perform like seals at every opportunity, whether online, on the radio or at festivals; a culture in which some kind of backstory is useful, not to say essential (and all the more so if you are white, male and seemingly privileged). A quiet writer is an invisible writer and therefore an unsuccessful one.

Nor is it possible to argue that Mallory, however extreme his case, isn’t on a continuum: whether we care to admit it or not, we’re all rolling along on a conveyor belt of pretence and deceit now. Some of this has to do with identity politics and the pressure it exerts in terms of how others may perceive us (and how we want them to). In my case, there came a point when I stopped being coy about aspects of my northern childhood; what I’d previously kept hidden, I began subtly to deploy, the better to make myself seem less privileged or perhaps just more “authentic”.

Some of it has to do with the internet and the way platforms such as Instagram invite us to invent (or reinvent) ourselves: to tweak and craft our images, to “curate” our every thought, to offer ourselves up for the approval of others.

Put the two together and what you get is a ruthless, deadening and, above all, unthinking artifice. It covers everything, like enamel. To pinch from Smith again: “There is an urge to be good. To be seen to be good. To be seen. Also to be. Badness, invisibility, things as they are in reality as opposed to things as they seem… these are out of fashion.” We are, in other words, all impostors now.

• Rachel Cooke is an Observer writer