Revue de “The Faire Checker”: narrator follows his muse, not the truth

The cover of the first novel by Austin Kelley, “The Fact Checker”, will be immediately recognizable by a certain type of person: Ah, the New Yorker, could they think, before blinking and realizing that this is not the case.

I am that kind of person; The famous weekly has been around my whole life, problems stacked on the bathroom counter or lying open to the kitchen table, and I also read them too. At one point, I learned of his famous facts, people who worked in relative darkness (the magazine does not list them anywhere, although you can find them by Trawling Linkedin) in order to ensure that each factual declaration that the magazine publishes is correct – even if these facts appear in poetry.

“The Fact Checker” is told by a man holding the titular title who is, essentially, a stroller: a literary type that wanders in his urban environment, observing and commenting on society from a somewhat detached position. Although the magazine for which he works remains without name, he is clearly supposed to be the New Yorker; But readers hoping for juicy initiate gossip will be disappointed (in any case, real initiates – those who were there in the middle of the Ahites, can recognize the types and temperaments of the narrator of Kelley interagisse at work). The title, the coverage, the police – they are all fairly effective baits.

The fact that the facts appears in the novel, of course. The main plot, which takes place in July and August 2004, starts when the narrator receives an article to check the Green Square Union market – called Mandeville / Green for its author and its subject, respectively. It is a fairly simple part, and the factory verifier treats a large part in a short time. But a quote, on the “harmful affairs” in progress on the market, makes him take a break, and he is looking for the source, Sylvia, in order to confirm what she said to the author and ask details.

Sylvia is a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Mandeville says that she is “interesting”, what the narrator recognizes could be an understatement so that she is crazy and / or sexy. It has a distinctive characteristic (a scar) which seems to increase its beauty in the eyes of the narrator, and is passionate about things, including the tomatoes it cultivates. She takes the narrator on a trip, first in a cemetery, then to a secret supper club short of a squat in the financial district of Lower Manhattan; She grew up in a commune and claims that it was really a cult, but she likes the idea of ​​cults: “If you are in a cult, you are really committed, worshiping the divinity. Love good. That's all I want to do in this life. Love the good. ”

After lying with the narrator, she leaves him a promising note to call and disappears quickly. He passes the rest of the novel trying to find her. Like the definition of the Nathan Rabin criticism of the type of dream girl of Pixie Dream which exists “in the feverish imagination of sensitive writers”, Sylvia is there “to teach young cultivated men moving moving to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”.

The factory verifier, who is not entirely on an ex -girlfriend who deceived him with his thesis advisor – another familiar type – is one of these young man. While trying to find her, he finds himself in a series of interesting places (an anarchist meeting in a boat, for example, or the Memorial of Irish hunger), speaking to interesting people (the friends of Sylvia and her colleagues, mainly, but also in a fact of doing facto. Street signs in New York).

The verifier of the fact is an unreliable narrator not only because he tells his story to delete at least seven years (he mentions Lyft in the last chapter, which was founded in 2012), but also because each time he is not in the office, he is still a ceremony drinking, often at the time of the breakdown. This seems to be more a problem that he admits, and it is not the only deception he practices.

He wants to be a good guy: he is always nervous that he will be perceived as frightening by the women he meets, he questions his hypotheses about the people he sees, and he is uncomfortable with the sexism of which he witnesses among friends and male acquaintances. But he never questions so when he is aware of such “guy's speech” and he minimizes how his own obsession with finding Sylvia is linked to her fantasy of her, as well as how her disappearance reminds him of the own behavioral models of his ex.

The de facto verifier is a committing figure not for himself – a friend of Sylvia, Agnes, tells him at a given time that he is “a virgin man” and that she is not wrong – but for the inconsistencies in his behavior, and the dramatic irony inherent in the misappropriation between his own narration and what we, as well as those around him, start to him. “I remember this day well,” said the de facto verifier on the first page of the book, but at the end of his first meeting with Sylvia, when she hands him a bag of tomatoes, he thinks, “he seemed intimate, almost flirtatious. Or maybe I remember badly.”

Although “The Fact Checker” is uneven, it is a fun and fast reading, and that raises some of the most relevant questions of the day: what is a fact? What is truth? And who can decide?

Masad, a critic of books and culture, is the author of the novel “All My Mother's Lovers” and the next novel “Beings”.