Ken Kalfus

It seems impossible—and also a little foolhardy—to write a novel set in the #MeToo movement as it reached its fulminating peak in 2017 with the toppling of Harvey Weinstein. There are so many trip wires blocking the way. Ken Kalfus has written a novel that proves it can be done: A Hole in the Story is nuanced, sure-footed, dryly funny, and unpredictable. If there were such a thing as a social-mores thriller, this would be it. The setting is a wonky Washington magazine (think The New Republic) where the revered editor is confronted by a sexual predation he made in 1999, back when Bill Clinton was struggling to avoid impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Trump, in his second term, has reduced “cancel culture” to an insult aimed at woke-loving Democrats. A Hole in the Story restores its meaning in a complex human drama that is disturbing and totally addictive.($26, milkweed.org) —Alessandra Stanley

hide

n Kalfus’s resonant latest (after 2 A.M. in Little America), a political reporter reflects on the Clinton years during a present-day sexual harassment scandal. When Adam Zweig receives news that his former boss Max Lieberthol, a legend in the liberal establishment, has been “#MeToo’d,” he initially pleads ignorance to a reporter before reflecting back 30 years earlier, when he was a young staff writer at the magazine Next Deal under the charismatic Lieberthol’s stewardship. The accuser, Valerie Lovine, was a Next Deal freelancer at the time and a close friend of Adam’s. In flashbacks, Kalfus reveals that Valerie told Adam about the assault soon after it happened, and that Adam offered comfort but took no action against Max. Later, Adam and Valerie have a brief and awkward affair. As Adam considers the contemporaneous events of the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, he questions whether he was as enlightened about gender relations as he’d thought. The insights are subtle, as Kalfus writes with economical prose and avoids polemics even as Adam’s soul-searching leads to devastating honesty, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions. This is sobering. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA. (Apr.)

hide

An edgy, discomfiting look at the alpha males of journalism in the age of #MeToo.

Adam Zweig is a successful political writer in Washington, the veteran of a thousand think pieces. He’s in his late 50s, divorced, a man of regular habits. So, when he’s messaged by a young reporter on the trail of a D.C. mediasphere sexual-harassment scandal, the alarm bells tripped aren’t the loud and blaring kind. Mainly, he feels sorrow—the accused is Max Lieberthol, years ago Adam’s editor and mentor at a magazine that resembles the New Republic. Adam, a good progressive, initially hits a morally tutting tone (how could Max have been foolish and vain enough to proposition a staffer?), but there’s sympathy underneath. He’s disappointed, but he wonders: A story like this, about an offense two decades old, committed in a kind of prelapsarian boys-will-be-boys era by an aging lion whose magazine has always had a big reputation, but (after all) a small readership—even in the age of social media, what legs can such a story have? Then—and Kalfus masterfully persuades us that the withholding is not reader-deception but self-deception—Adam begins to recall and recount the context. The accuser, Valerie Iovine, was his closest friend in the office, and Adam was present, outside Max’s office, when the incident occurred; Valerie told Adam about it immediately afterward, and he helped to console her. Adam feels duty-bound to confirm that Valerie is telling the truth, and this—he wants us and himself and most of all Valerie to believe—is an act of characteristic rectitude. The book’s steadily mounting tension derives from what comes next, as circumstance and Valerie herself require him to excavate more thoroughly his relationship with her, a friendship that grew into a professional intimacy and that then (in Adam’s way of seeing it) turned briefly romantic soon before—this having nothing to do with him!—Valerie withdrew from Washington and disappeared into the exile of small-city journalism.
A taut, uncomfortable look at a man forced into a reckoning that’s much more personal than he’d like.

hide