THE FACT CHECKER, by Austin Kelley
Hollywood aspirants had the William Morris mailroom. Junior literati long vied to join The New Yorker’s fact-checking department (or, for the gals, the typing pool). They hoped to breathe the magic vapors of E.B. White while cooking up the Great American Novel.
In the age of “truthiness” and “fake news,” and with ChatGPT hovering like a mockingbird, the role of fact checker has been newly narrowed and consecrated. Or so suggests “The Fact Checker,” the first novel by Austin Kelley, a former New Yorker fact checker. It’s a sprightly hyperlocal caper that is also, intentionally or not, a Notes and Comment on the fragile state of urban intellectual masculinity.
We’ve come a long way from “Bright Lights, Big City,” which jump-started the career of Jay McInerney, another former New Yorker fact checker, in 1984 … or have we?
Both books have unnamed young male protagonists. Both lampoon entrenched procedures and starchy characters at the New Yorkerish magazines where they toil: In “The Fact Checker,” which is set in 2004, there’s a veteran checker named Mr. Lancaster, “a frail old ghost of a man” who stocks the house library with multiple volumes on Civil War artillery and is comically conscripted to check a piece on the rapper 50 Cent.
Both narrators bop around downtown and go on benders, though the preferred poison of Kelley’s is whiskey, not Bolivian marching powder. Both pine for their exes; then, a fashion model named Amanda; now, a graduate student, Magdalena.
Our 21st-century fact checker used to be a graduate student, too, specializing in 19th-century utopianism, until he realized “no one really wanted to read academic history.” He worships the Fonz and looks like Tony Shalhoub, the actor. He loves watching baseball and hates playing. “There was that painful slow time when the ball arced through the air. It was excruciating. Was I under it? Yes. No. Yes. No. Too late.”
Since Magda ran off with a professor, he has struggled with romance in New York, where — and this was before the apps — dates and meetings are oft confused and “everyone was tentative and ambiguous.” He is, he comes to realize with some consternation, “a meat eater who’s never killed anything.” One of the things he’s compulsive about checking is the fly of his pants.
Kelley’s hero doesn’t long to escape his duties, as McInerney’s dissolute alter ego did, but takes pride in his variegated beta role. He’s been assigned to check a story about the Union Square Greenmarket, by a debonair but careless restaurant critic named John Mandeville, one of whose sources is a farmer, Sylvia. Mandeville neglected to get her surname, and so the checker — encouraged by the promise that she’s “interesting” — goes to interview her.
Who is Sylvia? Cryptic, lanky and scarred, she feeds him a life-changing heirloom tomato. She herself is something of a hot tomato.
One of the novel’s charms is uncovering the vulnerable ornaments — wacky statues, call girls on 11th Avenue, subterranean oyster restaurants — of an increasingly “Big Box Manhattan.” Sylvia and the “blank man,” as a friend of hers calls him, visit a graveyard in the financial district on an ambiguous date, then an illegal farm-to-table supper club called Heads and Tails, consuming tongue, offal pie and pork served five ways. They hook up. And then, lacking a cellphone, as some did then — “trying to maintain some freedom” — she disappears.
Is there something more, something sinister, to Mandeville’s story? To Mandeville himself?
Especially in one chapter so gruesome I had to read it through reluctantly parted fingers, “The Fact Checker” argues for a heightened sensitivity to the brutality of the food chain. (In this it reminded me of “The Vegan,” Andrew Lipstein’s 2023 novel about a financier who starts hearing the animals.)
But it’s also about the looming gig economy, the division of labor in the field of writing as well as potatoes. Not for nothing do we now refer to “content farms.”
Planning a story about the Swift Boat smear campaign, the magazine’s staffers can’t quite see yet that they’re in a changing ecosystem, where supply is soon to outpace demand and alternative facts are hopping onto the conveyor belt of public record.
In one Don Draper moment, Kelley’s fact checker considers “how strange it is to stand inside a giant building held up so high in the air, with other people standing inside a giant building on other floors, each in their own world, and how hard it is, at any minute, to know exactly where you are and what caused you to be there, and what you should do next.”
He’s researching the collapse of the twin towers, which were so boldly featured on the original cover of “Bright Lights, Big City.”
THE FACT CHECKER | By Austin Kelley | Atlantic Monthly Press | 256 pp. | $27
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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