In Enron's undoing, the devil's in the details

''You are there" can be an exhilarating technique for writing about calamity, war, or romance.

But when it comes to unraveling Byzantine accounting scams, the up-close-and-personal approach tends to get you scene after scene of people sending e-mails and scanning paperwork and less-than-gripping moments like ''Andersen's accounting team was flummoxed by Fishtail, the latest LJM2 deal."

In ''Conspiracy of Fools," financial journalist Kurt Eichenwald puts us behind the scenes as Enron Corp. cooks up one fraud after another, then begins to collapse like a house of cards. As the book ends, the Houston energy giant that once ranked number eight in the Fortune 500 has filed for the largest bankruptcy protection in US history (now surpassed by WorldCom Inc.), $60 billion in shareholder wealth has gone up in smoke, and the company's top three executives are facing prosecution.

Eichenwald's vacuum-cleaner reporting yields some memorable vignettes -- screaming matches, boardroom showdowns, noble whistle-blowers, and drunken, despondent outbursts from Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling.

You are in the room when an underling finally confronts chairman Ken Lay with the words no one wants to hear: ''There are two possible outcomes here. One is you look incredibly stupid and look like you did a bad job, and the other is, they try to put you in jail."

But for all of Eichenwald's success in getting insiders to spill details and combing court papers for sizzling nuggets, ''Conspiracy of Fools" fails to explain just how Enron managed to ride so high. The unrelenting focus on chicanery leaves unexplained why so many presumably sharp Wall Streeters believed, at least until late 2000, that Enron's frenzied dealmaking culture truly represented the brilliance of a new mold of corporation. It's 750 pages of vividly documented lies, crimes, and coverups with no profound analysis.

Eichenwald also seems to have a case of what's come to be known as Bob Woodward Syndrome, when sources' willingness to talk to reporters determines just how bad they look in the book. Skilling and Lay clearly opened up at length to Eichenwald. They get the chance to come off as nuanced and agonized, if still crooked. It doesn't look like the company's chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow, helped Eichenwald. Thus the Fastow of ''Conspiracy of Fools" is two-dimensional, venal, and evil.

The book also moves no closer to a stronger link between Enron and President Bush, a longtime beneficiary of Enron contributions as governor of Texas and as a 2000 presidential candidate.

In the handful of personal interactions Eichenwald has been able to re-create, apparently from Lay's memory, Bush offers nothing more than benign expressions of gratitude for Lay's political support and tells Skilling he thinks of Enron as ''a great company."

For people with a direct interest in Enron, Eichenwald's book will undoubtedly provide a host of new glimpses into what went wrong. The reportage is thorough, the writing brisk. But ''Conspiracy of Fools" is all too long on trees and far too short on forest.

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.