Jay McInerney was a fact-checker at The New Yorker, an experience that shaped his best-selling hit, Bright Lights, Big City. Austin Kelley is also a former fact-checker at the magazine, so it says something about his wonderful novel that McInerney generously blurbs it. It is praise well deserved, since The Fact Checker, told in first-person voice rather than the second person as McInerney famously did, is a romp, following the narrator’s adventures as he tries to uncover what really is going on at an organic farmers’ market written up in a piece that he fact-checked. This is a novel with both soul and humor, and it will never make you yearn to be a fact-checker. Unless you want your heart broken.
From its start in 1970, National Public Radio has been revered for its authoritative reporting and calm, assured voices, positioning itself as a paragon of fairness and competence. We can thank NPR for giving us All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and This American Life, and thank it, too, for honing the kind of storytelling that dominates the podcast world. The problem with a sterling reputation, of course, is that it is easy to tarnish, and in Steve Oney’s excellent history we learn that most of the damage to NPR in recent years was self-inflicted, from inept executives to ham-handed decisions, to fierce warfare over coverage, especially the Middle East. Oney, of course, does full justice to the considerable accomplishments of NPR, and his own skills at vivid storytelling make events both inside NPR and the events it covered come alive. As for gossip, NPR is up there with community theater, so those itching to know what NPR brass thought of Ira Glass will not be disappointed. (Short answer: don’t let the door hit you on your way out.)
Mary Cassatt was that rare creature: a female American who became one of France’s most famed Impressionist painters. She lived most of her life in France but kept in close touch with American friends, and Ruth E. Iskin examines her life through her American identity and her suffragist views. Her beliefs clearly affected how she portrayed older women, motherhood, and fatherhood in her work, and she served as an important adviser to art patron Louisine Havemeyer. Cassatt was quite shrewd about her legacy, cultivating collectors on both sides of the Atlantic and donating her own works to major museums, especially in America. Her gender was not always in her favor during her lifetime and in the years immediately after her death, in 1926, but recent decades have been kinder to her memory as female artists have become more widely celebrated. Iskin has written a marvelous book, blessedly free of academic jargon, shedding fresh light on Cassatt’s work, and putting her in her rightful place in the Impressionist pantheon.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIl
