Is imitating 'Bright Lights, Big City' a form of flattery?

Austin Kelley's 'The Fact Checker' recalls Jay McInerney's novel with mixed results

Detail from the cover of The Fact Checker / Grove Atlantic

A slightly pompous literary cliché says that critics should “take a book on its own terms.” It means simply that a reviewer should try to understand and respect what an author has set out to do. If a book describes a road trip to Winnetka, don’t say the writer should have gone to Poughkeepsie because you like the city better.

That axiom helps to ensure fairness to authors and readers, and I’ve tried to follow it a critic—most recently, in a post mentioning

Erich Hoyt

’s Orca, his memoir of swimming with killer whales. I loved the book, but if I’d hated it, I wouldn’t have sniffed, “This book may be about whales, but it’s no Moby-Dick.” Hoyt wasn’t trying to one-up Herman Melville, just to describe a unique adventure in Vancouver.

Even so, like most critics, I’ll waive my rule about taking a book “on its own terms” if it seems to beg for comparison with an another. Reviewers could hardly avoid mentioning David Copperfield in their reviews of Demon Copperhead or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in talking about James, and most didn’t try.

My latest waiver involves Austin Kelley’s first novel, The Fact Checker. Kelley worked as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, as did Jay McInerney, who satirized the magazine wonderfully in a signal novel of the 1980s, Bright Lights, Big City.

The action in The Fact Checker unfolds in the summer of 2004, and it has enough in common with its antecedent that you suspect it has its roots a question by the author, “What if somebody updated McInerney’s novel for the 21st century?” Kelley lacks McInerney’s gift for satire—he’s too kind-hearted for it—and his humor tends to be gentler. He wisely doesn’t try to ape his predecessor’s brilliant use of second-person narration.

A blurb from McInerney

But The Fact Checker resembles McInerney’s book in more than having a young male narrator who’s a fact-checker at a New Yorker-like weekly. The novel also involves an ex, drugs, a nightclub, offbeat denizens of a magazine, and a fixation on an absent woman. It’s arrived with a blurb from McInerney and has come from a publisher, Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, who’s known McInerney for decades.

The two novels also make some of the same points. McInerney’s unnamed narrator delivers a warning to fact-checkers about mistakes: “If an error slips into the magazine, it is one of you, and not the writer, who will be crucified.”

Kelley’s hero echoes that view of who gets blamed for errors: “It’s the fact-checker and not the famous writer who is responsible for these things. That’s the way fact-checking works.”

That echo isn’t plagiarism—it’s natural for two undertakers to describe embalming in a similar way. But it suggests a conscious or unconscious influence so heavy, it might have taken Harold Bloom to sort out all of it.

That level of imitation in a novel typically requires enough literary invention by an author to make you forget an original, or at least to appreciate the new book without continually comparing the two. Kelley works hard to deliver it.

Austin Kelley / Jennifer Miller

The Fact Checker melds several genres: mystery, comedy, social realism. The critic

Nick Ripatrazone

has made a good case that the novel is a “philosophical detective story” in the spirit of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Lot of 49, and that’s fair, too.

A narrator who had a goth phase

The book also gives off a whiff of the neo-Gothic. As a teenager, the narrator says, he had a goth phase—he wore a black trench coat, listened to Bauhaus and the Cure, and liked to visit an old cemetery. You wonder if he’s entirely outgrown it when, early in The Fact Checker, he lets an untrustworthy woman lead him to a churchyard with a Gothic gate and then to a supper club, reached via a dim hallway and deserted staircase, where people in their 20s feast on a dead pig.

Superannuated goth or not, the narrator turns amateur sleuth when he has to fact-check a story about a Manhattan greenmarket. He has trouble verifying a cryptic reference to shady on-site business dealings made by an elusive source named Sylvia, who—in one of many implausible details in the novel—has no phone. So he stops by the market, where he finds that she grows extraordinary heirloom tomatoes.

But he can’t wrest from Sylvia the verification he needs, and intrigued by her inscrutability, he follows her to a creepy supper club in Lower Manhattan. He spends the night with her at his place, and then she ghosts him. The rest of the novel involves his quest to find out where she’s gone and whether it may involve questionable characters he’s met at the market, including a manager who runs a cult-like out-of-town farming collective and a worker who may be dealing OxyContin.

The narrator keeps facing setbacks when nothing is what it seems in the novel. Not the tomatoes at a greenmarket. Not the women the narrator follows thinking they might be Sylvia. Not a Manhattan tombstone bearing the name of a character in a novel, someone who never existed, yet whose supposed burial spot was once a major New York tourist attraction.

Can we trust fact-checkers?

Behind all the mysteries lies an onrush of ideas about facts, truth, and reality. Can we ever know the “truth” about a subject? Can we trust even our own memories, let alone the work of professional fact checkers? Aren’t we all, like Kelly’s narrator, “chasing a mounting pile of facts, all potentially wrong, without time to breathe or think or make sense of any of it”? If so, what’s the point of the effort?

These are all worthy questions, if overfamiliar in the age of Trump. But they make for a low-energy novel, full of implausibilities and pace-slowing digressions into topics that don’t advance the plot, such as why New Jersey is called the Garden State.

Sylvia is such a flake that you never fully understand her appeal to the well-educated narrator. She says things that tend to sound more profound when you’re a stoned 19-year-old college sophomore than when you’ve living in New York and wondering how to pay the rent even with four roommates in Bensonhurst. Among her pseudo-deep observations akin to Holden Caulfield’s musing on phonies in The Catcher in the Rye:

“People love a helpless woman, especially if she’s dead or, like, totally made up, you know. There is so much fake sentiment out there. It makes real sentiment seem so hollow.”

That writing may have high appeal for students at progressive colleges like NYU, where the author teaches, who own heavily annotated copies of The Bell Jar, another book in which the humor rises far above that in The Fact Checker.

But even fans of Sylvia’s pop wisdom may flinch when they come to a gruesome scene in which the mild-mannered narrator inexplicably lets himself take part in the grotesque slaughter of a large animal. That episode that becomes all the more out of place when the novel drops the narrative thread it seems to set in motion.

The most effective passages in the novel arrive early and involve amusing glimpses of fact-checking or city life. Manhattan may or may not have a coffee shop called Grounds Zero, but Kelley makes it credible. The book also has nice lines in a more serious vein. Looking for Sylvia, the narrator visits the Union Square greenmarket on “a grossly humid July morning”: a perfect description of the July morning on which I read the book and, in fact, of most summer days in the Deep South.

Yet even the best passages at times beg the question of what we’re supposed to make of them. Is The Fact Checker an homage to Bright Lights, Big City? A semifictionalized memoir of The New Yorker? A condemnation of the flim-flammery behind the sale of some “heirloom” produce at upscale greenmarkets? You might want to take this novel “on its own terms,” but you’re never sure what all of those terms are.

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My background: I’m an award-winning critic and journalist who’s been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of a large newspaper, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. My reviews or other articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Salon, and many other print and online media. I’ve taught writing at two large U.S. universities and spoken at many writers’ conferences.

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