I suppose I should add my voice to the chorus of stories about the convicted felon’s first 100 days, 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 written by 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. An esteemed journalist named Adam Zweig 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. This is an edited version of a longer conversation I shared on my Substack newsletter this week:
Q: What specific incidents or trends prompted you to write this book?
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: 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, but today even some progressives think it may have gone too far. Is that a fair point?
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: Your book also has much to say about contemporary political journalism and its practitioners. MAGA voters dismiss the whole process as “fake news,” but clearly people like Adam are 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?
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!
Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
