I remember vividly where I was when I read Ronan Farrow’s investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s abuse of more than a dozen women, many of whom worked for him, or hoped to. I read it sitting on the edge of a fireplace, tucked in a meeting room off to the side of my college campus’ dining hall.
In the days that followed, thousands of women turned to social media to share their experiences of sexual abuse and harassment both inside and outside of the workplace. Social media gave women a means of sharing their experiences and seeing that they weren’t alone. Record numbers of women ran for political office the next year in 2018.
The Me Too movement felt like a turning point in some ways, but even as it was beginning, it felt fated to fall short of its lofty goals. Donald Trump, who famously boasted about sexual assault, was the president. Brett Kavanaugh was elevated to the Supreme Court despite chilling testimony from Christine Blasey Ford.
Today, that era feels like a distant past. Donald Trump is in his second term in office and a number of his cabinet picks and close advisors have been accused of sexual misconduct. In his latest novel, A Hole in the Story, Ken Kalfus takes readers back to the frenzy and optimism of the early days of the Me Too movement—albeit from a slightly cynical lens.
His novel follows Adam Zweig, a journalist, as he mulls over what to do when a former colleague, Valerie Iovine, accuses their old boss, Max Lieberthol, of sexual harassment. Zweig worries about what he should or should not say as reporters hound him for answers about the office culture at the prestigious political magazine where he worked. All the while, people are tweeting—condemnations of his former boss, support for Valerie, questions of Adam’s own character.
Fans of Kalfus will likely recognize Adam, from the short story “Mr. Iraq.” Here, Kalfus revisits the character at both an earlier point in his life—well before the Iraq War—and a later one, during Donald Trump’s first term. He’s more optimistic as a younger, albeit still middle-aged man, more jaded when he’s older, and struggling throughout both timelines to make sense of a moral landscape that seems to be shifting like tectonic plates beneath him.
Kalfus and I met at a Philly coffee shop to discuss revisiting old characters, writing about the Me Too era, and how social media and other technologies affect fiction.
Courtney DuChene: It’s interesting having this Me Too-like book that follows the perspective of Adam, this man who’s reconsidering his past after a boss is accused of sexual harassment. Why did you want to inhabit that perspective?
Ken Kalfus: I think in the time of Me Too—and I hate using the word “Me Too” because it’s become a diminishing term—there were a lot of people making assessments. A lot of my women friends were looking back on their past and what had happened to them. People were talking to me and there were a lot of stories that were created by that particular moment. People were coming forward with stories.
And novelists like stories. I could feel the possible stories emerge, and the character that emerged had already appeared in one of my previous books, in a short story, “Mr. Iraq.” He was a Washington journalist.
I’m drawn to characters with appealing politics who do bad things, and I’m drawn to characters with terrible politics who do good things.
He’s called Mr. Iraq because he works for the magazine and he supports the Iraq War. I’m drawn to characters with appealing politics who do bad things, and I’m drawn to characters with terrible politics who do good things. As a novelist, I look for those kinds of contradictions in people’s lives.
So I thought that was a fertile ground and I played with it and it seemed like there was a story there. I was mostly interested in him. I was mostly interested in how, as the story progresses, he would think about things, looking back at the past. The foreground part of the story all takes place within a single day and what his thoughts might be on that particular day.
CD: What made you come back to this particular character who’s been in one of your short stories?
KK: I liked him when I first made him. He inhabited contradictions and characters with contradictions, like people with contradictions, are interesting. And I like journalism. My wife’s a journalist, many of my friends are journalists, and I care a lot about journalism. Most journalism books are very skeptical of and critical of journalism. I don’t think this book is. Maybe it’s critical of the individual people involved, but it takes journalism seriously. These days I think that’s important. So I wanted to write about that particular world.
It was easy for me to fit that character into [this new] situation. The original story took place around 2005, 2006. I wanted to see him maybe 13 years in the future, and also a number of years in the past. I had to figure out exactly his age, and the other character’s ages, and where they fit in chronology with their lives in the story.
CD: Something that’s perhaps a uniting characteristic in your work is these characters that are more complex than they are sympathetic. I think a lot of writers, especially young writers, think about trying to write characters that people will like more than they think about writing characters that are interesting. How have you approached writing characters that are complex and interesting through your career?
KK: I never thought of it quite like that. I always think writers think their characters are interesting, whether you like them or not. I mean, obviously [there are] some great characters in fiction, [like] axe murders, who, nevertheless, we’re drawn to. You can be sympathetic to the [trials] of a character, even though you’re not sympathetic to him as a person. The character can be a monster, and yet the author tries to get the reader into his head and make you feel something for the judgment he’s making. Even if you don’t agree with him, you might care.
CD: Within A Hole In The Story there are two main time periods: the sections in the past and those in the present day as he tries to think about what his role in this story is, if he should be talking to the media, and what he should be saying. The past sections are set around the time of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. A lot of the modern day reckoning around sexual harassment in the workplace hearkens back to the Clinton/Lewinsky and Clarence Thomas scandals. What parallels do you see between those worlds, and what made them fruitful to explore in fiction?
KK: One of the amazing things to me about the Me Too sexual harassment crisis was that I thought a lot of this stuff had been settled with the Lewinsky case. I remember reading that this was obvious harassment because of the power differential, and I was surprised that so many men did not get that memo. I got the memo.
I think that’s one of the issues: 20 years on, we’re still talking about this. As Me Too found, people are still making these bad judgments. So I wanted to go back there, because [Adam] was a Washington journalist. He was very involved with that. And it gave us the opportunity for the magazine to act counter to the liberal narrative at the time by urging Clinton to resign. That was part of [the character] Max’s iconoclasm, because liberals didn’t believe he should resign, myself included.
It was fruitful to come up with that conflict. It worked also with my timeframe because I had this guy’s history. It was liberating in a way to have [his] history already thought out, or part of history thought out already. I’d never done that before, and it gave more heft to my mind, to my imagination.
Looking back now, there’s a really great article, I forget where it’s published, about the changing perspectives on Monica Lewinsky, on how many different ways the view of her has changed over the years.
People were really mad at her at the time of the impeachment—scoundrel, victim, heroine—all those different things came up. I’m not saying that’s all in this novel; it isn’t. But some recent articles have been quite interesting. We’ll never be done thinking about this stuff. So hopefully my novel and its characters might take it further.
CD: The novel is in Adam’s perspective from the close third. Early on, we get this musing about his time working with Max and their editor/writer relationship. He says Max was always able to find a hole in the story. That’s where the title comes from. It primes the reader from the beginning to look for holes in Adam’s thought process. How did you work with that as you were writing?
Human error is so much part of who we are and how we tell stories.
KK: In all my books, characters make mistakes. Human error is so much part of who we are and how we tell stories to ourselves, about ourselves, about things that happened. Often, those narratives are not correct. They’ve been biased. They’re delusional. There’s a hole in the story that they’re not going to put into their narratives, because they don’t want to think about it, which is, I think, what happens here.
CD: I want to talk a little bit about the character of Valerie, who in the present day sections is in some ways kind of absent. We see her through the news about her, The Cut essay she publishes, and then the DMs she sends to Adams and the tweets Adam sees that are maybe hers. How did that kind of haunting—though that’s not quite the right word—presence work with Adam’s psyche?
KK: I think the idea is that this whole situation is a reckoning for him to figure out what happened to her after the incident. He hasn’t really done that. He goes back and he looks at what she’s been doing. He tracks her down and creates an image of her. So I didn’t want her actually on stage. I wanted her to be something he is inventing.
And then she does materialize, but only on his Twitter feed. I wanted to emphasize the process of invention that he’s doing. It’s not necessarily correct, but he’s trying to recreate what happened to her after the incident outside the restaurant Chi-Chi’s. So much of our relationships with each other are projections. I wanted to have him create that projection and then have her jump in on his feed.
At one point early on in the writing process, I actually had them meet for lunch to sort some stuff out. And then I realized, after I wrote it, that it’s better to see it as a manifestation. So first I had him imagine her, but then I had her appear as a manifestation through social media which, I found, reflected that intense environment we were in. I don’t know if we’re still in it now. As far as Twitter’s concerned, I think a lot of people have pulled back. I thought about that intense environment we were in and how it moved society, and I thought it would be interesting to write about that moment where social media is just intense.
I was never a big poster, but my wife is. It’s part of her experience of life. Social media in general affects society in a very deep way. The novel makes some references to it without attempting to be the definitive social media book. I’m very interested in how media in general, going back through most of my novels, has affected our mindset.
CD: It’s not, as you said, a definitive social media novel, but that interest in media and how technology has affected their lives, I think is really resonant.
I think it’s resonant in my mind, or at least in my previous books. My first novel Commissariat of Enlightenment was about the rise of propaganda via filmic image. It’s set in the early 20th century and it’s about a filmmaker who ended up working for Bolsheviks. It’s set in Russia. And it is about the way that the image of something can be changed—manipulated—to make you think one thing and not the other. The Bolsheviks in my novel learn to use that for their purposes.
My second novel, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, is set in this country, and it’s a black comedy about this couple who are in the middle of a terrible divorce. They live in New York. He works at the World Trade Center. She was supposed to be on Flight 93. She missed a flight. He’s late for work. So they each think the other one is dead that morning. The whole world is full of shock and horror comedy, and they’re thrilled. It’s a comedy. And that novel, again, takes us to the first years of the century, and it’s meant to tell how public history has become so involved in our personal history. What happens to us in public life—the war in Afghanistan, the anthrax thing—happens to them in their marriage. I wanted to know how the public occupies our imagination.
And my fourth novel, 2 A.M. in Little America is about the polarization in our media and the different lives, different narratives we see created for us in a, I think, cataclysmic way. So there’s definitely a throughline of interest I have in how we think about ourselves and how parts of ourselves are mediated through various electronic media.
