Checking Facts in a Post-Truth World

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15-04-2025

by Austin KelleyAtlantic Monthly Press, 256 pp., $27
IN THE 1950S, TO CAPTURE WHAT IT WAS LIKE to have his stories sunk by a fact-checker, a Time magazine writer came up with a song. 'I don't think we can say this / I don't like how we play this / I'm not sure that's the way this was,' it went, with the words sung to the tune of 'You're Just in Love,' by Irving Berlin. (Berlin's daughter, Mary Ellin Barrett, was coincidentally a fact-checker for the magazine.) Ultimately, the song's 'arrogant' writer, who claims his 'facts are set in vivid hue,' gets put in his place by a dismissive researcher, who delivers the final lyric: 'They're not lies, they're just not true.'
Artist Elizabeth Moran unearthed the parody tune in the Time archives while researching the magazine's fact-checking department. She also discovered that from the magazine's founding in the 1920s until the 1970s, all its fact checkers were women. Time editor Edward Kennedy cheekily warned them: 'the most important point to remember in checking is that the writer is your natural enemy. He is trying to see how much he can get away with. Remember that when people write letters about mistakes, it is you who will be screeched at. So protect yourself.'
Fact-checkers have since entered popular culture as arbiters of truth. In Seinfeld, Elaine Benes dates Jack, 'a fact-checker for New York magazine.' She adds: 'It's not much, but it has a certain type of quiet dignity.' Jay McInerney worked as a fact-checker for the New Yorker for ten months before he was fired. He 'wasn't very good at it,' and 'left ingloriously with my tail between my legs'—only to go on and satirize the job in his 1985 novel Bright Lights, Big City. At one point, the novel's second-person narrator offers a warning that echoes Kennedy's: 'If an error slips into the magazine, it is one of you, and not the writer, who will be crucified.'
Now, forty years after Bright Lights, we have Austin Kelley's The Fact Checker, a novel that dramatizes the life of another unnamed practitioner of the titular profession. While both books mock the minutiae of the job, Kelley's novel is less in the lineage of McInerney and more in the tradition of another facts-obsessed writer from New York: Thomas Pynchon.
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'AS A CHECKER, YOU DON'T CHOOSE what you check. You check everything. That's the calling.' Kelley's narrator-protagonist thinks of his job as a vocation. The novel's first line warns us that his career is short-lived: 'It may seem odd, if not idiotic, that the story that took up so much of my time and energy, the story that was ultimately the end for me, was about food, not terrorism.'
Kelley, like McInerney, once checked facts for the New Yorker, although he doesn't seem to harbor as much of a grudge as his predecessor does against their former department. In this novel, the fact-checking department is an ascetic cadre: 'We were quiet. We were careful.' Although he had often to 'badger people about details, sometimes irrelevant details,' he 'knew from experience that some details, irrelevant in themselves, become more significant when they pile up.'
Such work is only possible when one believes in capital-T Truth. The novel's fact-checker is a former history graduate student whose work on nineteenth-century utopian communities ultimately felt slight. 'Even in academia,' he admits, 'most people wanted sound bites and oversimplifications.' Yet now, 'as a fact-checker . . . my job was to prevent oversimplifications, to prevent distortions, to prevent lies.'
Fact-checking has lately come to signify catching misinformation and disinformation from politicians, specifically (and from one, in particular). While the noble goal of honoring the truth remains, this mode of fact-checking, especially when it is done in real time, naturally shades into lie-catching, which will always feel haughty and ideologically motivated to some. But in the magazine world, fact-checking remains a slower, more careful art. As a writer, I've been fact-checked by Rolling Stone and the Atlantic, but also by publications well outside the legacy enterprise (including The Bulwark). It is comforting, truly, for someone to verify that I am telling the truth.
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Yet the narrator of The Fact Checker knows his project is tenuous. 'I'm always drowning in a storm of information and doubt,' he laments, and his situation only gets worse after he is assigned a story on a farmer's market. The market specializes in 'trendy tomatoes,' and the whole affair seems rather tame save for an errant source: a vendor who claimed there was 'nefarious business' going on at the market. 'People sell everything here,' she said. 'It ain't all green.'
The fact-checker goes to the market 'on a reconnaissance mission.' Fieldwork isn't necessarily beyond his responsibilities, but he admits that his visit was premature. 'I had not yet prepared my full list of questions. I didn't know exactly what I needed to know.'
The reason soon becomes clear. The fact-checker is lonely. His ex, Magda, was often dismissive of him. He'd been single ever since their breakup: 'I was stuck in my head.'
Enter Sylvia. She's quirky and chatty. She even asks if he likes fact-checking, which makes him feel special. He wants to ask Sylvia more questions, but she doesn't have a cell phone. She asks if he can stop by Friday at closing: 'We can go somewhere else to talk,' she says. And then she hands him a bag of tomatoes, suggestively: 'It seemed intimate, almost flirtatious.'
Soon enough, the fact-checker is at a nightmarish supper club party with Sylvia's friends, who 'wheel a table into the middle of the room' bearing the severed head of a pig named Siddhartha; it arrives looking 'wet and oily, almost like melting wax.' Sylvia spends the night at the fact-checker's place. All seems to be going well—or, well, you know. Well enough.
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BUT WHEN MORNING COMES, THE FACT-CHECKER wakes to a coy note from Sylvia that ends with a mysterious postscript: 'Yes! Let's do it.' She's gone, and he's confused. He thinks about all their conversations and tries to parse them for leads and information about the story, but also to understand the meaning of her exclamatory note.
A day becomes a week. Still nothing from Sylvia. He returns to the market, and she's gone. Nobody has any leads. Facts are his life, and since the facts aren't adding up, his life is starting to become very confusing. He needs to repurpose his professional tools for a more urgent task than he is accustomed to taking on.
Here, at the halfway mark of the novel, The Fact Checker reveals its true form: This is a philosophical detective story. And its clearest and best predecessor is Thomas Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1966. Like Kelley's novel, Pynchon's book arrived during a tumultuous time in America, one where intense polarization had damaged the nation's fundamental sense of the truth.
In The Crying of Lot 49, a woman named Oedipa Maas discovers that she has inexplicably been made 'executor, or she supposed executrix' of the estate of her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity, an eccentric real-estate mogul. She travels to Inverarity's home to meet with her co-executor and start looking into her ex's records. It is Sunday, with little else happening. She parks her car on a hill and looks down.
'The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity' as 'the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit.' Smog chokes the horizon, but sun pushes through, and Oedipa feels 'at the center of an odd, religious instant.'
Oedipa wants to believe there is order in the world, that there is a reason why she has been chosen for this task—as Kelley's fact-checker clings to his belief in the simple existence of the truth, a clutched talisman of reason. Yet in scene after comic scene, Pynchon throws boffo complications into Oedipa's search.
Oedipa is undaunted. 'I want to see if there's a connection,' she says. Through sheer force (or farce) of will, she seeks patterns. But she begins to doubt herself, and fears that she truly is the victim of an experiment—or worse, a conspiracy. Oedipa's steadfast belief in the power of truth—of an order behind the disorder—again connects her to the central character of The Fact Checker. Kelley's narrator knows the world is strange; he's made a career of verifying its oddities, praising its many-splendored reality and rebuking writers for the shortcomings of their offerings to it. Fact-checkers are the priests of the empirical.
In Lot 49, Oedipa finally crashes headlong into the conspiracy. Old fillings in her teeth start to hurt. She stares upward at the night sky. 'There were headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains.' Although her body seems to be succumbing to paranoia, Pynchon offers just enough clues to keep her going—to keep us going—until we are forced to accept that either Oedipa has lost her mind or her increasingly elaborate fantasy is real.
For all of the novel's silliness, Pynchon's stance is clear: there is a greater meaning in the madness, in the cacophony of our world, as long as we are brave and clever enough to find its patterns. Reading The Crying of Lot 49, we get the sense that Pynchon believes in some order, some God behind the curtain.1 But things have happened in the intervening decades that put Kelley's book at a far remove from Pynchon's. (Some of the steps along the historical way are evident in the subject matter of other stories the fact-checker has worked on; the titles of the parts of the book draw from a famous Bush-era locution.) When we try to steal a glimpse behind the curtain in 2025, many of us—like Kelley's narrator—see nothing there.
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THE FACT CHECKER FOLLOWS SOMEWHAT more pedestrian narrative paths than Pynchon's book does, although the aforementioned pig's head and an odd scene with a sheep in a bathroom get close to evoking the latter's surrealism. But the two books share an absurd sensibility, from odd characters to deliberately cringeworthy quips. (The local coffee shop in The Fact Checker, for instance, is called Grounds Zero.) Most importantly, both novels depict characters riding their obsessions into a sort of personal oblivion. In Kelley's novel, save for a little conversation and even littler intimacy, the narrator doesn't really know Sylvia. He's not quite in love with her, exactly, but rather the idea of her. Or it might be that he loves the idea of her in the context of a conspiracy he has uncovered and now must heroically expose.
The climax of The Fact Checker is underwhelming, but arguably, it must be. With all its top-line absurdity, The Crying of Lot 49 would feel almost mimetic now: Imagine explaining the key players and major events of American politics in 2025 to yourself near the end of the Obama administration. 'Pynchonian' has become a ready-to-hand descriptor for contemporary chaos, but Pynchon's formative strangeness, the kind he showed in his early novels like The Crying of Lot 49, landed like a bomb in a cultural landscape defined by a fraught sense of tradition and convention, where challenges were being brought from every corner against strong positions. The culture of his time still believed in truth, however much that notion had already been damaged. His novel played with and upon something that was still there.
In contrast, Kelley's novel arrives in a world wherein imagining American culture as characterized by a foundational acceptance of verifiable facts feels either anachronistic or terribly naïve. Kelley's protagonist doesn't save the day; he doesn't even understand it. This makes The Fact Checker a book that is intensely aware of its time. Perhaps we need more subtle comedies like this to help us comprehend what has happened to the truth.
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1
Raised Catholic in Glen Cove, Long Island, Pynchon regularly went to Mass and confession while a student at Cornell, and in his first novel, V, a Jesuit preaches to rats in the subway.