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A new novel captures a bygone era in New York journalism
“To be a checker was to have the NYC Green Book, the city’s official directory—a literal book back then, and literally green—always at hand,” Susan Choi recalls of her time as a fact-checker at The New Yorker in the 1990s. Source Images: Adobe Stock
What i always say is that I wasn’t a very good checker. I don’t mean I made mistakes—mistakes being, in fact-checking, failing to catch someone else’s mistakes. I mean that the things I checked weren’t serious or difficult, that generally, the bar was pretty low. This was at Tina Brown’s New Yorker in the mid-1990s, a time when the magazine was trying to raise its own heart rate. The idea was to make headlines, not just cultural history. But when we had a piece whose publication might result in a lawsuit or an international incident, or a person’s vindication or ruination, or a significant and unanticipated paradigm shift on a matter of collectively agreed-upon importance, such as the Holocaust or Shakespeare, I wasn’t the first checker anyone thought of. My boss—a brilliant, kind, and fair man I still count as a friend—tended to pitch me softballs, an expression I’ve never understood because I didn’t check sports articles either, being equally ignorant about every sport. I tended to check culture pieces: reconsiderations of, say, Maria Callas, for which there was no “peg”—an occasion in the real world that dictated when it should publish—beyond the opera-loving author’s strong feeling that Callas was owed some attention. This was the sort of piece that might long remain in unscheduled limbo, allowing me to bone up on Callas, about whom I knew nothing. The rare times that my piece had a peg, it was usually the release date of a movie under review. Any short deadline at all, even for a film review, quickened my pulse. I would take my sheet of red-underlined dialogue that the reviewer had quoted and my number ten pencil and hurry off to a midday screening with a sense of urgency while my office mate, who was the other kind of checker, held the fate of the free world’s leader in his hands, fielding calls from frantic White House staffers with an imperturbable calm. When his herniated disc acted up, he would take the calls while kneeling before his desk on a pillow.
By the time we meet the titular protagonist of Austin Kelley’s novel The Fact Checker—who is only ever referred to as “fact-checker”—he appears to be my kind of checker. Sure, weighty matters like Abu Ghraib once kept the checker at his desk. Such cares as these don’t make it past the novel’s opening paragraph, and soon the desk is left behind, too. Kelley’s fact-checker spends very little time at the office, and not because he’s WFH. The year is 2004, and WFH is not really a thing. When we see him at home, the fact-checker is mostly sleeping off hangovers. During business hours, the fact-checker perambulates, if with purpose. The fact-checker hits the streets to confirm changes in signage style, to observe social dynamics, to find out where his tomatoes are coming from. These adventures do not, perhaps, make for the most accurate portrayal of the job, but they make for a very enjoyable novel. The Fact Checker is a workplace comedy, a trivia-rich love letter to New York, and, to top it all off, nicely written, which is more of a rare treat these days than it should be. I tore through its lean, witty, plot-heavy pages in just a few hours, on a sun-splashed Sunday afternoon, on my favorite sofa, backgrounded by the Tammy Wynette playlist my ironic teen had programmed in an uncharacteristic attack of sincerity—a foolproof recipe for happiness. So why did I find it so sad—even painful—to read?
more than the ivy league institution that whisked me from Texas to the Northeast, more than the second Ivy whose grad school I dropped out of not quite ten years later, The New Yorker’s fact-checking department was my higher education. It’s no exaggeration to say that when I was hired, in 1995, my only real qualifications were a helplessly generalist approach to information—I’d barely fulfilled the requirements of a major in college and had failed to identify a specialization in grad school—and a terror of getting things wrong. I checked and double-checked, I corroborated, I mistrusted myself. I found it very hard to attain the condition of unshakable certainty we checkers called “checking sure.”
This perpetual uncertainty made me a decent checker, if not, like my office mate, a swift one who could handle breaking news. But I still felt part of a great enterprise. At the time, I might have defined “great enterprise” in institutional or organizational terms: the department, the magazine, and the city itself, the learning of which was such a critical part of the job. To be a checker was to have the NYC Green Book, the city’s official directory—a literal book back then, and literally green—always at hand. To be a checker was to know what the N in N. Moore Street really stands for. Early in Kelley’s book, speaking of the Union Square Greenmarket, his narrator remarks, “That’s Greenmarket, one word, capitalized. It’s a trade name used by the Council on the Environment of New York City, a nonprofit that founded the city’s farmers markets in 1976.” This was the first of many times I burst out laughing while reading. The line might not be funny, but it’s exactly in the spirit of the great enterprise, or of the many small things of which that greatness consists. I might have also defined the great enterprise in vocational terms: as the practice of journalism, even as the making of history.
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Although the inciting incident of The Fact Checker is something suspicious going down at the Greenmarket, the novel is less a mystery than a fleet picaresque. The fact-checker himself, a nice if helplessly pedantic grad-school dropout who’s been single a little too long and drinks a little too much, is less the subject of the story than its tour guide, and what he’s showing us isn’t really The New Yorker or even fact-checking, but New York City before the smartphone. Kelley’s decision to set The Fact Checker in 2004 is his single most impactful novelistic decision. It allows him to make omissions from the story world that, while anachronistic, are unlikely to be noticed by any but a fact-checker: the words Google and internet never appear once in the novel’s 243 pages. Both existed in 2004 and were frequently used by fact-checkers, no less than colored pencils and deskbound landlines. But Kelley’s fudging of this is of a piece with his emphasis on the fact-checker’s extramural adventures. The vast majority of a checker’s hours are spent at their desk, reading source material or page proofs or using the phone. In my checking days, such jaunts as the fact-checker seems to enjoy for the greater part of most days were, in fact, a rare treat. But just like in Kelley’s novel, these rare events take up almost the whole of my fact-checking memories.
I don’t remember much in specific detail from the hours of reading and making phone calls. What I do remember is sitting in the midday dark of a Times Square movie theater surrounded by solitary men in long coats, confirming the quoted lines of dialogue in Anthony Lane’s review of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. I remember Joan Didion bringing me hot tea in very fragile china cups that would rattle alarmingly in their saucers as she made her cautious way toward me through the apartment she shared with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, who had not, as the magazine’s regular writers did, sent the department his source. I remember being flown to Washington, D.C., to check a profile of Ted Kennedy by Elsa Walsh, who had just given birth and who had also not sent us her source. In the middle of my sifting through it, a housekeeper summoned me downstairs, where I took a seat on one side of a long, shiny table at the head of which sat a small man who clearly had not been expecting company for lunch: Bob Woodward, Walsh’s husband.
It’s unsurprising that these are the things I remember, and Kelley’s novel is entertaining because it also leans heavily on the fact-checker’s oddball encounters. But to dismiss these incidents as worthy of remembrance and narration is to risk missing something important about them—that their obvious distinction is how they were all interactions containing something intimate, something vulnerable. I knew what those moviegoing men in their long coats were up to. I sensed the effort it took Didion to carry that cup. (Like my mother, she had multiple sclerosis.) I was eating with Walsh’s famous husband while elsewhere in their house, she nursed their newborn child. Somehow, my fact-checking job had slipped me into the envelope of another human’s most personal realm.
I might have given the impression that Kelley’s fact-checker never sits at his desk, and this isn’t true; the novel opens with one of those calls we spent hours conducting, in which all the revelations, however hard-won, that a reporter had extracted from their source over days, weeks, or even months of relationship building had to be rehashed by the checker for confirmation, sometimes in just a few minutes. The Fact Checker takes its time with this opening phone call, paying close attention to pacing:
I was also stringing the CIA widow along. I was specifically not asking her about her husband’s mistress. Not yet anyway. “Did you grow up in North Carolina?” I asked the widow next. This was a fake question. The article did not mention her upbringing, and I was pretty sure she did not grow up in the South. She had a Baltimore accent, I guessed. It was an odd accent. But I made up this question because I wanted to make her a bit more comfortable. I wanted to get her talking freely before I moved on to her husband’s extramarital affair.
I also engaged in this improvised dance, in conversation with a stranger, in which I knew where I wanted to go but not how I would get there. Intuition and calculation shared the helm. The atmosphere was one of intimacy vastly out of proportion with acquaintanceship. The tone of their voice, the tone of my voice, the order in which topics were broached, the length of a pause, the smoke-and-mirrors use of irrelevant questions to grease the wheels of disclosure—all was a mode of seduction. And yet unlike seduction, which I associate with one-sided greed, the transaction of checking seemed to draw on a shared interest and perhaps even a shared pride in getting things right. This was true even when the facts being confirmed were among the last things the source wanted disclosed.
it annoys me that I struck an elegiac note from the start of this piece; it annoys me that I felt an elegiac feeling from the literal opening words of Kelley’s book (“PART ONE: KNOWN UNKNOWNS”). Fact-checking hasn’t gone away. On the contrary, it’s more culturally visible than ever, as well as more politicized, circumstances that are, I think it’s safe to say, related. Meta got rid of its fact-checkers earlier this year, making global headlines; the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org has survived more than twenty-one years; fact-checking Trump’s utterances and those of his cronies has become, I think it’s safe to say by design, an enormously time-consuming enterprise for news organizations. That day I shared lunch with Woodward, I didn’t tell him he was a childhood hero of mine—not because I feared coming across as a stalker but because idolizing him was so ordinary; it would have been like telling the Beatles you listened to their music. These days, it’s clear that Woodward’s unsparing and prescient exposures of the first Trump presidency did not exactly transform mainstream sentiment. A couple million people bought Fear (2018)—and many tens of millions voted for Trump a second time anyway. Is this because, as a society, we don’t care about the truth anymore? Or because there’s so much earthshaking, existentially threatening truth that we can’t digest any of it, let alone celebrate those who inflict it on us? At lunch, Woodward was very kind to me. He was curious about me—like any great journalist, any great seeker of truth. This is another way in which The Fact Checker, in getting it right, made me sad. The eponymous checker is tirelessly curious, but this curiosity of his is not presented as a character trait. It simply goes without saying.
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And so perhaps what I most ached for while reading Kelley’s book wasn’t a simpler world than the one we live in now but a simpler feeling, which Kelley captures exactly: the simple feeling of liking to learn new things, and liking to meet new people who might teach you new things. The simple feeling that “known unknowns” are the right place to start but far from the end of the story. I’ve mentioned how hard I found it to be checking sure, but in this I was no different from my co-checkers. Some of us threw up in the mornings before sitting down at our desks. Some of us smoked too much. All of us worried. But our state of doubt wasn’t only fearful; it was also electrifying. Our perpetual uncertainty, our perpetual drive to become checking sure, propelled us toward so many people we would have otherwise never met or spoken to. It propelled us toward so much knowledge that we had previously not even known we could know. Many years later, when my marriage collapsed, a couples therapist urged me and my then-husband—also a former fact-checker—to “stay curious.” Many years later still, my Buddhist meditation teacher encouraged our class to “equalize” our attitude toward all beings, to find them all equally commanding of attention, respect, well-wishing, and, yes, even love. In both cases, the recommended feeling was familiar to me. I recognized it from, of all things, fact-checking.
In the middle of relating his call with the CIA wife, the fact-checker remembers a different, if similar, call with the girlfriend of Shaquille O’Neal, whose profile the fact-checker was checking:
At one point, I asked her about the spelling of a tattoo on Shaq’s stomach between his right nipple and his navel. “Hold on,” she said, and she took off his shirt. “It’s LIL Warrior,” the girlfriend read to me. Shaq, shirtless, grumbled in the background while I made his girlfriend confirm the cases: “Capital L, capital I, capital L,” she said. “Are you sure there’s no apostrophe?” I asked. No, there was no apostrophe.
The passage reminded me of a profile of Elton John I checked almost thirty years ago. It opened with many details about John’s country estate, the statuary of its formal gardens, the upholstery of its sofas. My source for the checking was John’s then-boyfriend and now-husband, David Furnish, who fielded my finnicky questions in the same proximity to his other half as Shaq’s girlfriend to Shaq in Kelley’s novel. “Elton, how big were the squash courts?” Furnish would ask, and then John would answer, as audible to me as he would have been were he on the phone himself, and then Furnish would repeat John’s answer, and then I would ask my next question, which John could surely hear as clearly as I could hear him, and then Furnish would repeat after me, and so on. I recall the conversation as very relaxed, as if we were sprawled out together on the chintz-covered sofas, drinking Pimm’s Cup, maybe preparing to stroll the football pitch turned Italianate gardens. John and Furnish were in no hurry. The peculiarity of the system—that John did not speak to me directly—perhaps had been meant to impose a distance between the idol of my youth and the lowly fact-checker. Yet it didn’t feel that way at all. The whole encounter was strangely more intimate, staged as it was. No detail was too small to be handed about between us, considered fully, confirmed. I was checking sure at the end of that call, and I like to think that David Furnish and Elton John felt the same way. It was a good way to feel.
Susan Choi is the author of Flashlight and five other novels, including Trust Exercise, which received the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. She teaches at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn.
