49 pages • 1-hour read
Faker
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Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The story opens as Trey and his father meet with a rich man who wants to invest in a show dog. Trey’s dad presents an immaculate and perfectly behaved Great Dane, which the rich man is eager to buy. After handing over a check, the rich man leaves, and Trey’s dad explains to his son that this is yet another of his confidence tricks. In reality, the dog is not a show dog; it has been rented from an agency that trains animals for movies. Hearing this, Trey is disappointed but unsurprised. After a lifetime of working with his dad to con rich people out of their money, he is used to his father’s schemes and doesn’t feel guilty about them. Trey’s dad has always been a good parent to him and his sister Arianna and has often explained that the “marks” don’t need all their money anyway.
Trey currently attends Spealman Academy—an expensive, exclusive boarding school in New England. He has attended several such schools over the years, befriending the students there so that his dad can then get close to their parents and enact his confidence schemes. The only disadvantage to this arrangement for Trey is that he doesn’t get to see his dad very often. He is therefore excited when his dad says that they have another appointment tomorrow to sell the same dog to a different man. Trey doesn’t understand how his dad can sell the same dog twice, and Trey’s dad explains that he is not selling the dog at all; he is merely selling the idea of the dog because he can sell an idea over and over again. Trey finds this concept to be brilliant and reflects that his father’s lessons are “a more important education than anything [he has] learned in even the fanciest academies” (11).
Chapter 2 Summary
One of Trey’s earliest memories of learning his dad’s trade is from his kindergarten days at another rich private school. During a school play, Trey’s dad scooped him up from the wings of the stage and dashed out to the car, where the family then fled the town entirely. After being chased by police, they pulled up to a cliff, where some men helped Trey’s dad to push the car into a ravine. Trey’s family got into another car so they wouldn’t be recognized, and his dad used this experience to teach him about extraction—the process of extricating themselves from a con. Now, although Trey sometimes misses the daily lifestyles that he is forced to leave behind with each extraction, he never regrets his family’s activities or feels used by his father. He understands that his family is more important than anything, and he believes his father’s claims that “we do the things we do so that we can stay together” (14).
Chapter 3 Summary
Now, Trey plays on the lacrosse team at Spealman because this is the most popular sport, enabling him to befriend other kids easily. One day, Trey’s dad unexpectedly arrives at a big game against a rival school, where he gives Trey the code word “Houdini.” This means that the con is going badly, and they need to get out. Although Trey knew that this moment was coming, he is upset because he has been enjoying his time here and doesn’t want his friends to hate him for his role in the con.
Before Trey can make his escape, the game starts, and he is tasked with playing. Instead of passing the ball to one of his teammates, Trey launches it into the nearby woods and then goes after it. He meets up with his dad and Arianna at the getaway location, and they speed out of town. Although the con abruptly took a turn for the worse, Trey’s dad and Arianna celebrate how much money they made before they had to flee, but the only thing Trey can think about is the fact that he is being forced to leave friends behind once again. As a result, he feels left out of the celebration, but he doesn’t care because, as he notes, “Right now, I’m not loving the idea of being in” (24). Trey’s dad takes responsibility for the con’s failure, claiming that he didn’t give Trey enough information to work with. From now on, he plans to treat Trey like a full partner. As Arianna complains that she isn’t a partner, Trey feels his sorrow over the loss of his life at Spealman fade in the glow of being considered a true partner alongside his dad.
Chapter 4 Summary
When Trey was in fourth grade, he built a volcano for the school science fair. His dad initially helped, but when the family’s fake-jewelry con intensified, he went back to his con and left Trey to finish the science fair project on his own. On the day of the fair, Trey set off the volcano only to find fake diamonds pouring out with the lava. Arianna scooped them up before anyone realized what they were, but Trey felt betrayed to realize that his dad had used his school project as a hiding place for stolen goods.
Now, in the aftermath of their extraction from Spealman, Trey and his family go on “vacation,” which means that they disappear to an island to wait until the aftermath of their latest con fades away. While there, they get rid of all their old electronics and delete any traces of themselves from the internet. Trey is also forced to delete his Spealman email account. His old roommate sent him several emails, but unlike all the other messages from Spealman students, these emails convey his roommate’s sense of hurt, not anger. For a moment, Trey considers keeping in touch, but he knows that this is impossible, so he deletes his email account, reminding himself that “just because it’s right doesn’t make it easy” (35). Trey’s dad picks a small town in Tennessee as their next destination, reasoning that they should avoid rich private schools after the Spealman con.
Chapter 5 Summary
Trey’s family moves into a rich neighborhood called the Pointe, which overlooks a lake in Boxelder, Tennessee. Because Trey will now attend public school, not all of his fellow students will be rich, so he will use the neighborhood to figure out which kids to befriend so that his father can target their parents. When a cat wanders into Trey’s yard, its owner, a boy named Logan, comes looking for it. The cat’s name is Mona, after the Mona Lisa, and Logan is surprised that she likes Trey because she typically doesn’t like anyone. Logan lives nearby in an expensive home, and Trey feels a surge of pride at the thought that he has made his first useful connection. Logan’s parents are art dealers who own a high-end gallery, and when Trey ends his interaction with Logan, he thinks, “Today is a good start” (45).
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
By opening the story with Trey’s memory of the show-dog con, Korman establishes a baseline for the family’s habit of engaging in confidence schemes, and it is also clear that Trey’s dad is actively raising his children to continue these criminal pursuits into adulthood. When the show-dog con is successful, the author emphasizes the charisma and persuasive tactics that Treys’ dad uses to manipulate others into trusting him with their money. Most importantly, however, this situation suggests that Trey will one day have to work on Redefining a Personal Code of Ethics for himself as he reckons with The Tension Between Deception and Honesty. As a young boy, Trey accepts his father’s behavior unquestioningly, and his youthful lens keeps him from realizing the nuances of the con as it unfolds.
This early scene demonstrates how Trey’s father chooses his marks, and the family’s skewed sense of morality soon becomes apparent, especially when Trey’s dad claims that he only steals from people who won’t miss the money. He also justifies his activities by using special terminology, as when he calls his efforts to avoid arrest an “extraction.” This word carries official connotations and allows him to obscure the fact that his activities are illegal. In this way, he convinces himself and his children that breaking the rules is acceptable under certain circumstances. This problematic upbringing saddles Trey and his sister with a faulty moral compass, and it is only through careful reflection that a teenage Trey will eventually begin questioning the merits of his dad’s behavior and recalibrate his own views on the family’s illegal pursuits.
Thus, the question of right versus wrong remains at the center of the novel’s premise, and rather than outlining a clear-cut situation, the author instead creates characters whose moral code is ambiguous at best. For example, although Trey’s dad is manipulative by nature, he also genuinely loves his children, and he consistently uses his illegal activities to provide for them. However, by using his love and familial devotion as an excuse, he finds a way to ignore the legal and moral questions behind his confidence schemes. His decisions reflect The Tension Between Deception and Honesty, for he uses his honest love for his children to justify the deceptions that he perpetrates upon others. Because Trey’s dad is Trey’s primary role model, the boy also subscribes to this problematic version of family values, and it is clear that his dad’s mindset powerfully influences his view of the world.
Only when Trey realizes how deeply his family’s activities have hurt his friends does he finally start to break with his dad’s views. While Trey’s dad and Arianna view their targets (or “marks”) as nothing more than opportunities for personal enrichment, the relationships that Trey forms with other students at school force him to realize that his family’s chosen marks are real people. This time, unlike the rest of his family, he cannot shrug off the damage he has done. Even in moments when he feels that his father has betrayed him (as when Trey’s dad uses the science fair project to hide his stolen loot), Trey keeps forgiving his family because he has internalized the belief that conducting confidence schemes is the only way they can stay together and survive. In addition, his tendency to see his father as a hero makes him susceptible to the man’s calculated flattery. This dynamic becomes apparent when Trey’s dad dubs him a full partner in the family business. Believing that is father is proud of him, Trey easily slips back into his family’s warped worldview, which focuses on deceiving others for personal gain.
The tone of the emails from Trey’s roommate in Chapter 4 foreshadows Trey’s imminent internal crisis over his family’s criminal activities and reiterates the necessity of Redefining a Personal Code of Ethics. When he reads his roommate’s emotional messages, he finally realize that his actions are morally wrong. After years of swindling people and incurring their wrath, Trey is used to angry emails and has grown numb to them, but the hurt and disappointment of his Spealman roommate affects him on a personal level. Because the boy considered Trey to be a true friend and believed that Trey felt the same way, he cannot understand why Trey would betray his family. As Trey is forced to confront his own actions, this moment initiates his slow but inevitable change of heart. Now that he has acknowledged the damage his actions are causing, he cannot go back to being indifferent to the effects of his family’s crimes.
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