The unnamed narrator in Austin Kelley’s madcap mystery, “The Fact Checker,” is a man beleaguered by uncertainties. He man works on the staff of a magazine that is legendary for taking fact-checking to heroic and often obscure lengths. Kelley’s debut novel playfully jabs at two celebrated New York institutions: the New Yorker magazine’s storied fact-checking department and the city’s beloved farmers markets.
By engaging with what the author calls “thickets of untruth,” this book could not be more timely.
The novel is set in 2004. At the end of a long week of difficult calls to a CIA widow, Kelley’s hapless fact-checker is assigned to work on what he thinks will be an innocuous article about a popular Union Square market stall celebrated for its trendy heirloom tomatoes. Initially, he writes, “Nothing raised any red flags at all.”
Why We Wrote This
How far would you go to check a fact? For this novel’s narrator, no effort is too great to ascertain the truth, even if the work becomes a compulsion. And even if it drives the people around him nuts.
Readers will enjoy the narrator’s descriptions of his famously nitpicky job. His mandate is to confirm every fact, quote, date, and source in a story. To the consternation of poets, he even fact-checks their verses. “You check everything,” he says. “That’s the calling. You have to pick and poke at every little assertion from every angle. And you never know, when you are picking and poking, what will ooze and leave a stain.” He adds, “I badger people about details, sometimes irrelevant details.”
That said, he’s proud to be “working on the side of truth,” and he enjoys becoming a mini-expert in a different subject every week.
The downside is doubt, the constant feeling that he is missing something important. This unfortunately extends to his personal life, where he frequently misreads social cues. Paranoia ensues. “You might say I have ‘trust issues,’” he says. He’s good at picking things apart – perhaps too good. He abandoned his history dissertation on 19th-century utopias after meticulously showing why each idealist community failed.
The farmers market story has a single line that gives the fact-checker pause. Its author, John Mandeville, quotes a vendor named Sylvia at the New Egypt farm stand who claims there was “nefarious business” at the market, and that “People sell everything here. … It ain’t all green.” Unfortunately, Mandeville doesn’t have Sylvia’s last name, or any contact information for her. “Trust me,” he says. Of course, that’s out of the question.
So the fact checker heads down to Union Square to find Sylvia, the purported source of these quotes. After all, diligence is the name of the game. No stone is left unturned. The problem is, some stones are turned so many times they’re left spinning.
When Kelley’s narrator finds tall and lanky Sylvia, he is so taken with her – and her delicious tomatoes – that he’s thrown off guard and has trouble asking about the nefarious business. When he finally does, she looks around furtively, hands him a bag of tomatoes, and sets a date to meet Friday after closing time. Is she flirting with him? Or is he misreading the situation, as usual?
What follows is a series of strange odysseys around town, first with Sylvia, and later, when she disappears without a trace, in search of her. With his question still unanswered, the narrator’s obsessive pursuit of the truth becomes entwined with an ever more desperate – and dangerous – quest to find Sylvia. He worries about foul play.
The fact-checker’s quixotic search dead-ends in way too many bars, and also leads him to several places that animal lovers and vegetarians might be advised to skip: a supper club in which hipsters consume animals head to tail, which they sanctimoniously call eating “holistically,” and a particularly bizarre episode in which he helps slaughter a live lamb in the writer Mandeville’s fancy SoHo loft. The latter event is a send-up of Bill Buford’s 2006 New Yorker article about butchering a whole hog in his Manhattan apartment.
When he’s not debunking flawed attempts at utopias or spotting suspicious behavior everywhere, Kelley’s nerdy narrator is forever searching online for odd bits of information, including how New Jersey came to be called the Garden State. We come to understand why his former girlfriend called him Mr. Encyclopedia and said he was “too much of a know-it-all, always complicating things, and then lecturing about something random and arcane.”
One thing is for sure: Kelley’s comedic hero is a chronic, self-sabotaging overthinker and, less amusingly, an overdrinker. “The Fact Checker” lands as a clever caper not just about sometimes elusive truths, but also about “the paralysis of encyclopedic doubt.”
