A quick glance at the cover of Austin Kelley’s novel, The Fact Checker, and you’ll recognize by font alone that the fact-checking taking place is at The New Yorker. The magazine in the novel is unnamed, but we get the gist. Plus, Kelley’s bio states that he was once a fact checker at—you got it—The New Yorker. The narrator, known to us as the Fact Checker, describes his life during a story he was assigned in 2004. An entertaining and sprightly read, it’s also a novel describing a world that manages to be both foundational to our current world and yet long gone at the same time.

Our fact checker is good at his job. We meet him as he describes investigating one story’s accuracy by quizzing (almost badgering) the widow of a fallen CIA officer. It’s all in service to the article, to its veracity. We also get the impression that he doesn’t mind name-dropping during casual conversation that he works for an esteemed New York magazine (even if he’s not authoring any of its stories). Still, he confesses that he’s “always drowning in a storm of information and doubt.” And he freely admits that he confuses his desires and disdains in both his personal and professional lives.

It’s pretty clear his girlfriend left him because she found his encyclopedic conversation corrections exhausting. It’s also evident he’s unsure of what to do about this pedantic trait of his. And it’s more than certain he doesn’t recognize that his internal moral outrage to boorish behavior he sees in others belies his own personal actions.

What provides him a singular purpose is a low-stakes story he’s assigned. A vendor at a city farmer’s market is selling a particular type of tomato that’s blowing everyone’s hair back. In the article, the Fact Checker is intrigued by a quote from a vendor employee, Sylvia, who says there’s also some “nefarious business” at the market. He finds Sylvia at the market and is completely beguiled by her. His opposite in almost every way, she takes him out one night to an underground supper club in the city. He learns a fair bit about her (she says she was raised in a cult). Yet, despite his repeated questions, he learns nothing about the supposed nefarious business.

Kelley captures the early aughts well. It’s a world where the George W. Bush administration had already presented their case for invading Iraq. To many, this presentation strained credulity as not only were there disagreements over what can be considered as fact, but also of what truths one can responsibly glean from said facts. Regardless, a presidential administration believing that they even need to justify its actions—to publicly persuade—seems like a bygone era.

We see the emerging urban hipsters, with some sporting a “jug band chic” look. The Fact Checker finds himself at a meeting of self-professed anarchists where there’s an unironic call to conduct a feasibility study of the group’s proposed actions. Food culture is taking off in New York City. One magazine writer, having just spent some time with a group of people who raise and harvest their own meat, decides to export the practice to his high-end NYC apartment.

In a tragi-comic scene, the Fact Checker stops by the author’s apartment and discovers that in the swanky bathroom there’s a lamb to be slaughtered. And kill it they do, the dead lamb ending up strung along the author’s back like a cape, which reminds our narrator of a skinny Hercules statue “with carefully coiffed hair and a dead sheep on his back, a lanky, stooped Hercules in a Picasso painter’s outfit in his blond Japanese soaking tub in his SoHo loft.”

Sylvia leaves the Fact Checker a cryptic note and promptly disappears. Hoping to find answers, he travels out to the communal New Jersey farm where she worked only to find that the commune’s inhabitants are just as clueless to her whereabouts. The Fact Checker is struggling to determine the facts and—without a doubt—the truth. The only thing he’s certain of is that the commune’s leader is “a lecherous hypocrite” who’s hiding something.

At the beginning of the novel, the Fact Checker chats with a woman he just met in a coffee shop, back when all “tentative and ambitious New Yorkers” had to meet each other through face-to-face conversation. Noticing that he’s nearsighted, she suggests he break periodically during the work day, look out a window, and then focus on the farthest object in view. He doesn’t believe this will benefit his eyesight, yet he does it at times. When helping with some farming work at the commune, he stops and looks out into the distance. “Someday it’s going to help, this staring into space, I thought, even if that help is nothing but a psychological balm, a sort of placebo effect on the problem of existence.”

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Review by Jason Sullivan

If you’ve watched HBO’s The Wire, then you’re familiar with Richard Price. As one of the show’s writers, his story lines were like urban sociological studies. Price’s novels, such as Clockers, Lush Life, and Samaritan, also display the constant pressure-cooker environment within high-density neighborhoods. Plus they are just flat-out fun to read, as is his latest novel, Lazarus Man. For example, if you’re amused when coming across a random character being described not merely as “thin,” but as “thin as a home-rolled reefer,” then Price might be for you.

Make no mistake, Price’s work has depth, often finding its way into university course catalogs. Still, we read novels not for outright edification. It’s the story and characters that earn our attention. And Price always delivers on that front, replete with his trademark snappy dialogue. Where Lazarus Man moves a little differently is how the novel unfurls. There’s an initial event, and then we just follow four main characters as they carry on. It’s not unlike Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, where we shadow characters just out living their lives. In Lazarus Man, it’s not 1990s Los Angelinos we’re tailing, but four East Harlemites in 2008. Maybe their paths will cross. Or maybe they won’t. Regardless, it’s their proverbial journeys we’re joining.

The anchor character is Anthony. He’s forty-two, unemployed, well on his way to a divorce, and attempting to kick a cocaine habit by trying out every bar on Lenox Avenue. Like some “80-proof Goldilocks,” he’s seeking the one bar that’s just right.

Then comes the event that sends the novel on its way: a tenement building collapses. Nearby, Royal, a down on his luck, third-generation mortician—who pretty much loathes his job—dozes in one of his unsold coffins. In order to make some extra cash, he’s playing the corpse as a group of film students shoot a horror film in his parlor. The sound of the building’s collapse sends Royal bolt-upright in his casket, properly freaking out the film students. Royal then has his young son put on an ill-fitting suit and go out into the chaos to hand out mortuary business cards.

Felix is a taciturn 20-something photographer who moved into the city from upstate. He grabs a camera and gets to work around the wreckage. Emergency personnel arrive as both survivors and nearby neighbors mill about, the “ash-coated” and the unscathed roaming together. The neighborhood becomes like some sort of “hallucinating block party.”

Mary, a beleaguered detective, is charged with finding out if an unaccounted for man is either somewhere in the rubble or is passively trying not to be found. A few years earlier, a freak elevator accident almost killed Mary. The event seems to have rattled her enough that she’s leaned back from most human relationships. It’s not that she doesn’t care. It’s more that she cares too much.

A victim of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, no one thinks to look for Anthony in the debris. When he’s eventually unearthed, he becomes a minor local celebrity, called upon to speak at various community events. He’s good at it, providing an outlet for pent-up community grief that goes beyond a collapsed building. The real question is whether Anthony believes what he’s saying.

Anthony’s mother was Black and his father white. Both are recently deceased, with Anthony now living in their apartment. Anthony’s long spiral began when he was kicked out of Columbia University for selling drugs. Someone suggested that he claim the university singled him out because of his race, but Anthony wanted no part of it. He knew that wasn’t the reason. Besides, his father was constantly charging racial discrimination on behalf of the Black community. Sometimes he was correct, yet at other times he wasn’t even close. Either way, he was always making a public scene about it. In many ways, Anthony wanted the same thing as his Black neighbors: for his father to shut up and mind his own business.

There is a surprise development at the end of the novel, underscoring the epistemological breakdown that fact and truth cannot be used interchangeably. Throughout, all the characters strive to do the decent thing in a difficult world. A good example is a mother who shows up to a community event to complain about how the cops harass some of the neighborhood teenagers. When a police officer at the meeting points out that her son often hangs around known gang members, the mother says that fact doesn’t mean he’s doing anything wrong. She continues, “You live in a certain place you got to be crewed up to not be a target. It’s a negotiated life.”

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Review by Jason Sullivan