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Red Pill. Knopf, 2020.
The writing of fiction premises a shared mooring in certain social facts. What happens when such consensus is dissolved—through fractionalization, the willful spread of lies, or the achievement of the former by means of the latter? Though it will take some time for them to become the subject of literature, the events of January 6 themselves present an object lesson in exactly this sort of dissolution. The storming of the Capitol resulting in the deaths of four of Donald Trump’s supporters as well as a police officer yielded a media spectacle that verged throughout on the unreal. Something in the elaborate costumery and foiled eleventh-hour plot of our villain seemed to have been anticipated dozens of times before, in logic if not episode. It’s not that you couldn’t make it up, but rather that any such invention would be redundant. Fiction’s usual vocation had, it felt, migrated into the fabric of the political field.