"I'm most interested in how my characters live in the historical moment"

I talk to Ken Kalfus, whose wry new novel tackles #MeToo and social media

I suppose I should add my wee voice to the chorus of stories about the convicted felon’s first 100 days (even William Henry Harrison had a better 100 days, despite spending 69 of them dead), but I’d rather change the subject. Believe it or not, there’s other stuff going on.

Let’s talk instead about a shrewd new novel that puts us smack in the midst of a #MeToo-social media shitstorm. Better yet, let’s talk with the author, Ken Kalfus, who, with wise concision and wry humor, has limned some “comically appalling” aspects of our contemporary culture. As one of his characters says, “We have to recognize this is the moment we live in.”

A Hole in the Story takes place in 2019, when Max, a legendary Washington magazine editor, is outed for a sexual harassment incident that happened in 1999 - and an esteemed journalist named Adam Zweig (our very human hero, or anti-hero) gets swept into the maelstrom because he may have known a little or a lot about the Max episode but said nothing at the time for reasons he may or may not fully understand or wish to acknowledge. The whole thing metastasizes on social media, with satirical elements that feel all too real.

In the spirit of transparency, Kalfus and I are friends. We lunch occasionally to talk politics, writing, and baseball. But I’ve been intrigued about the premise of this book since he first referenced it a few years ago - this is his fifth novel - and I was rightly confident that he’d capture the zeitgeist and etch memorable characters with his usual brio. Plus, there’s a scene in Trump’s Washington hotel…but I wouldn’t want to spoil that.

Anyway, we engaged at length, and I’ve lightly edited for clarity.

Q: What specific incidents or trends prompted you to write this book? For instance, were you thinking more about the metastasizing impact of social media on our lives, or about the impact of #MeToo on male behavior? Or, in your mind, were they always intertwined?

A: Social media was key to the #MeToo movement and to the breadth and intensity of the public response; it’s been intrinsic to every public phenomenon of, say, the last ten or fifteen years. In the case of my novel, I knew from the start that Twitter (as we once knew it, before Musk) would determine Max’s fate, even if he declares he doesn’t take social media seriously. As I worked my way into the story, Twitter became even more important to the plot. But sexual harassment is the first and central theme of the novel.

Q: On the subject of social media, I recently saw this quote from a retired military general, Stanley McChrystal: "We live in a world of instability...narratives shift by the hour. Every word we say, every action we take, is scrutinized, recorded and judged. The threat of digital mobs and public shaming doesn't protect us; it paralyzes us." Do you agree? Because that seems to sum up much of what Adam, your protagonist/reporter, is experiencing in the novel; at one point, you refer to it as "Life in a Shitstorm." I've experienced those myself.

A: I bet you have!

McChrystal lost his job after his aides’ insubordinate remarks were published in Rolling Stone, so he may have keenly felt the scrutiny. Public officials have always complained about journalistic scrutiny and yes, it does slow them down, necessarily.

And now, in the age of social media, intense scrutiny has come to extend to celebrities, to the journalists themselves and to private individuals, a term that increasingly means less and less. That scrutiny can indeed be paralyzing or, as Adam fears, potentially humiliating.

But one of the features of the usual social media shitstorm is how localized it is. Adam feels the whole world is laughing at him, threatening him and dumping on him. But of course it’s only his own personal Twittersphere. Our feeds give us the illusion of the world; that’s how they’re designed. The world is bigger than that. We know this. Adam knows this. So, for us and for Adam, having this double-knowledge generates tension and confusion. We can’t help experiencing the shitstorm as a global event, when it’s really just a shit-tornado.

Q: Your novel takes place in 2019, a year or two after the titanic news dump about Harvey Weinstein. Six years later, there's great support for "woke" and #MeToo, which seek to rectify huge historic wrongs. As one character says late in the novel, "We have to recognize this is the moment we live in." But today even some progressives think that woke and #MeToo may have gone too far, that often the punishment of cancellation is too severe in cases where the misbehavior is far less than Weinstein-esque. Is that a fair point? As Adam tells himself in the book, "progressive manners of the day failed to discriminate between the range of possible misconduct and the range of sanctions.”

A. That’s Adam’s thought, in the moment, not mine - though I mostly agree with the observation, with qualifications. At the height of #MeToo, there were indeed excesses, there was misjudgment, and there was reductionism. People were hurt unfairly. But it’s the baleful nature of our media environment to amplify extreme responses, on all issues, so that we react to the excesses; so that the excesses stand for the issue, whatever it is: reactions to Gaza, Israel, policing, etc. And then we lose sight of what matters.

No, I don’t think #MeToo went too far. I think the movement was an especially salutary phenomenon, in that it had us reconsidering and reflecting on relations between men and women, in the past and now. My novel draws from that reflective process, particularly from the stories I heard from women friends and men. We all heard stories. Some stories were appalling, some were comic and some, as in my novel, were comically appalling. We may have hoped that the movement would have effected changes in the ways we treat each other. Well, maybe it has. Mores have changed. And hopefully the conversation can continue, a bit more thoughtfully and generously.

I regret that the term #MeToo has become either jokey and trivializing or a stand-in for overreaction.

Q: Following up that question: Is it a stretch to suggest that a backlash to the woke/#MeToo sensibility helped fuel Trump's second victory? I couldn't help but notice how well Trump did with "bros" - young men under age 30.

A. I don’t know. I’m more inclined to think that dormant racism, activated by a seditionist with an uncanny grip on the American imagination, had a lot more to do with it. The question of “why the Democrats lost” ignores why Trump won. He’s a singular demagogic leader, the kind of individual that may appear only once in a country’s history. Unfortunately, usually at its end.

Harris would have beaten DeSantis, right? Then we wouldn’t be having this backlash conversation. And Clinton would have beaten Jeb Bush. And the Republicans might have replaced a more typical presidential incumbent who so badly mishandled the Covid crisis in 2020. So I think it’s Trump who’s writing the dismal national history of this moment.

Although my novels often play off current events and I’m often motivated by conventional liberal sentiments, I don’t consider myself a political writer and especially not a political analyst. I’m most interested in how my characters live in the historical moment and how the news and current media technology shape their perception of reality.

Q: Your book also has much to say, often between the lines, about contemporary political journalism and its practitioners. Adam, for all his Washington-style ambitions, is less than perfect in his craft; he acknowledges that much of what he and others write is ephemeral. In your words, a finished story is often "an approximation of something" that falls "into the unending churn of news and opinion, on the way to irrelevance," rarely touching "anything in the real world." MAGA voters dismiss the whole process as "fake news," but clearly people like Adam, as imperfect humans, are at least trying to get as close to the truth as possible, even if the world keeps moving on. Do you agree?

A. I have great respect for journalists and I revere journalism as an institution. Like other institutions I admire, including science and the law, it’s occupied by fallible, myopic, often foolish, often selfish men and women with complicated personal lives (nobody either of us knows, of course). This can make for institutional failure. It may also give us the opportunity for entertaining literature.

Reporting is actually hard work (as is the pursuit of science, law and literature) and reporters make mistakes, as Adam acknowledges with frustration. It’s important to communicate to readers the process: the finding of sources, the demands of storytelling, etc. - basically Reporting 101 - so they can judge how much confidence to put into any given story. But the fact that a practice and its practitioners are flawed doesn’t make it Fake.

The other issue, for Adam, is the tension inherent in journalistic commentary. A big-shot Washington columnist wants to have a long-term impact on the nation’s history, but by its nature the products of journalism are ephemeral. This creates an internal conflict that can be comic as well as tragic.

Q: What is it that you'd love readers to be thinking about most, once they've finished the book? The ways that social media increasingly distorts and subverts our efforts to communicate across cultural and political divides? The ways that men have traditionally mistreated and suppressed women, especially in the workplace, and how difficult it is for many men in the #MeToo era, fairly benign characters like Adam, to get their footing?

A: Like most novelists, I mostly hope readers will take away from my books some appreciation of my characters’ interior lives. I’ve spoken to quite a few readers about A Hole in the Story, I’m gratified about the range of responses, especially about how different readers judge Adam, Max and Valerie. This suggests that readers are considering the characters in the context of their own experiences and the story’s themes of workplace sexual harassment and social media. I’m happy about that. One of the promises of literature is that it will give us insight, first, into minds that are not our own, and then into our own ways of thinking. This of course has social and political consequence.

But I’m also pleased when readers tell me they laughed. It’s meant to be a funny novel!

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Two quick addendums:

*Adam Zweig actually debuted 10 years ago, in a Kalfus short story titled “Mr. Iraq.” Adam’s grand ambition was to write the perfect magazine piece that would spark the enactment of universal health care…but he gets tripped up over his earlier liberal support for the Iraq war. It’s comedy plus tragedy, or vice versa.

*Any fan of A Hole in the Story would likely love “Douglas Gets Canceled,” a new four-part miniseries on Britbox. Subscribe for a month; it’s well worth the price for the brilliant dialogue and rich characters. A beloved British TV anchorman is overheard making a sexist quip at a wedding, it implodes on social media…but I’ve said too much already.