I want to apologize, because we literary scholars have failed you. We’ve done so by praising and encouraging certain kinds of reading at the expense of others. In particular, in our writings, we’ve devalued one of the most popular kinds of reading—enjoying a story’s thrilling twists and turns, surprises and reveals—in short: reading for the plot.
There is a signal, born in the earliest days of the cosmos. It’s weak. It’s faint. It can barely register on even the most sensitive of instruments. But it contains a wealth of information about the formation of the first stars, the first galaxies, and the mysteries of the origins of the largest structures in the Universe.
Despite decades of searching for this signal, astronomers have yet to find it. The problem is that our Earth is too noisy, making it nearly impossible to capture this whisper. The solution is to go to the far side of the Moon, using its bulk to shield our sensitive instruments from the cacophony of our planet.
Building telescopes on the far side of the Moon would be the greatest astronomical challenge ever considered by humanity. And it would be worth it.
The unnamed narrator in Austin Kelley’s madcap mystery, “The Fact Checker,” is a man beleaguered by uncertainties. He 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.
There are literary lines and angles to be studied, and accompanying them, inside information about publishing, reviewing, and the rare books trade for any bibliophile to savor. Failing that, you can just try to work out who the killer is. If the novel’s thoughts on the state of England, the kids today, or The Novel itself don’t interest you, this is a strong fallback option, and so it seems that something very ingenious is going on, like a game where you choose your own adventure. Whodunnit? When someone scores a clever goal or wins on a nine-darter, the commentator says, “He’s done it!” So too the book reviewer: Coe has done it, he really has.
That the narrator finds such freedom, such self-coherence, such sense in this scene only after she has discovered inside it no such sense or meaning is key to this novel’s deeply radical thesis. It is into the unwritten, into meaning’s absence, that we are free to project meaning of our own.