The cover of Austin Kelley’s debut novel, “The Fact Checker,” will be immediately recognizable to a certain type of person: Ah, the New Yorker, they might think, before blinking and realizing that it isn’t.
I am that kind of person; the famous weekly has been around my whole life, issues piled on the bathroom counter or lying open on the kitchen table, and I eventually read them as well. At some point, I learned about its famous fact-checkers, the people who toil away in relative obscurity (the magazine doesn’t list them anywhere, though you may find some by trawling LinkedIn) in order to make sure that every factual statement the magazine publishes is correct — even if those facts appear within poetry.
“The Fact Checker” is narrated by a man holding the titular title who is, essentially, a flâneur: a literary type who wanders around his urban environment, observing and commenting on society from a somewhat detached position. While the magazine he works for remains unnamed, it’s clearly meant to be the New Yorker; but readers hoping for juicy insider gossip will be disappointed (actual insiders — those who were around in the mid-aughts, anyway — may recognize the types and tempers Kelley’s narrator interacts with at work). The title, the cover, the font — they’re all rather effective bait.
Fact-checking does feature in the novel, of course. The main plot, which takes place in July and August 2004, kicks off when the narrator is given an article to check about the Union Square Greenmarket — referred to as Mandeville/Green for its author and subject, respectively. It’s a simple enough piece, and the fact-checker deals with much of it in short order. But one quote, about “nefarious business” going on at the market, makes him pause, and he goes in search of the source, Sylvia, in order to confirm what she told the author and ask for details.
Sylvia is a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Mandeville says she’s “interesting,” which the narrator recognizes might be a euphemism for her being insane and/or sexy. She has a distinctive feature (a scar) that seems to heighten her beauty to the narrator’s eyes, and is passionate about things, including the tomatoes she grows. She takes the narrator on a journey, first to a cemetery and then to a secret supper club run out of a squatted-in office in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan; she grew up on a commune and claims it was a cult, really, but she likes the idea of cults: “If you are in a cult, you are really committed, worshiping the Deity. Worshiping the good. That’s all I want to do in this life. Worship the good.”
After sleeping with the narrator, she leaves him a note promising to call and promptly disappears. He spends the rest of the novel trying to track her down. Much like critic Nathan Rabin’s definition of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl type who exists “in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors,” Sylvia is there “to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”
The Fact Checker, who isn’t entirely over an ex-girlfriend who cheated on him with her dissertation advisor — another familiar type — is one such young man. As he tries to find her, he ends up in a series of interesting places (an anarchist meeting in a boat, for example, or the Irish Hunger Memorial), talking to interesting people (Sylvia’s friends and co-workers, mainly, but also an apparently lonely and chatty Tony Curtis), and having interesting thoughts, many of which are concerned with factoids he obviously learned while doing his job (Audrey Munson, the “American Venus”; the transition to new street signs in New York).
The Fact Checker is an unreliable narrator not only because he’s telling his story from a remove of at least seven years (he mentions Lyft in the last chapter, which was founded in 2012), but also because whenever he’s not in the office, he’s unceremoniously yet steadily drinking, often to the point of blackout. This seems to be more of a problem than he’s admitting, and it’s not the only self-deception he practices.
He wants to be a good guy: he’s always nervous he’s going to be perceived as creepy by the women he encounters, he questions his assumptions about people he sees, and he’s uncomfortable with the sexism he witnesses among male friends and acquaintances. But he also never interjects when privy to such “guy talk” and he downplays how much his own obsession with finding Sylvia is linked to his fantasy of her, as well as how her disappearance reminds him of his ex’s own behavioral patterns.
The Fact Checker is an engaging figure not for his own sake — a friend of Sylvia’s, Agnes, tells him at one point that he’s “a blank man” and she’s not wrong — but for the inconsistencies in his behaviors, and the dramatic irony inherent in the mismatch between his own narration and what we, as well as those around him, begin to see in him. “I remember that day well,” the Fact Checker tells us on the book’s first page, but by the end of his first encounter with Sylvia, when she hands him a bag of tomatoes, he thinks, “It seemed intimate, almost flirtatious. Or maybe I’m misremembering the whole thing.”
While “The Fact Checker” is uneven, it’s a fun and quick read, and it does raise some of the most relevant questions du jour: What is a fact? What is truth? And who gets to decide?
Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”