Review by Booklist Review
A former colleague's #MeToo comeuppance forces a journalist to confront the self-serving narratives he has maintained about his own past. As a staff writer for the Next Deal, Adam Zweig served under editor Max Lieberthol, who defined the Beltway magazine's progressive-contrarian ethos and, as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal unfolded around them, made an unwelcome pass at their talented young colleague Valerie Iovine. Queried by a reporter decades later, Adam recalls his friendship with Valerie, their long afternoons spent editing each other's work in the office and later in her Kalorama apartment, the loveliness of her breasts. Unlike Max, rationalizes Adam, his intentions were noble and romantic, even if Adam was married at the time to an idealistic but emotionally distant death-penalty attorney. As revelations of Max's conduct explode over social media, Adam realizes that the fumbling encounter he and Valerie had in a filthy public restroom wasn't as harmless as he remembers it. Deftly deploying a Philip Roth-esque unreliable narrator, Kalfus (2 A.M. in Little America, 2022) invites readers to share in Adam's male gaze and, eventually, his shame. Meanwhile, Valerie remains a cipher, an object of desire even in her moment of vengeance.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Kalfus's resonant latest (after 2 A.M. in Little America), a political reporter reflects on the Clinton years during a present-day sexual harassment scandal. When Adam Zweig receives news that his former boss Max Lieberthol, a legend in the liberal establishment, has been "#MeToo'd," he initially pleads ignorance to a reporter before reflecting back 30 years earlier, when he was a young staff writer at the magazine Next Deal under the charismatic Lieberthol's stewardship. The accuser, Valerie Lovine, was a Next Deal freelancer at the time and a close friend of Adam's. In flashbacks, Kalfus reveals that Valerie told Adam about the assault soon after it happened, and that Adam offered comfort but took no action against Max. Later, Adam and Valerie have a brief and awkward affair. As Adam considers the contemporaneous events of the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, he questions whether he was as enlightened about gender relations as he'd thought. The insights are subtle, as Kalfus writes with economical prose and avoids polemics even as Adam's soul-searching leads to devastating honesty, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions. This is sobering. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An edgy, discomfiting look at the alpha males of journalism in the age of #MeToo. Adam Zweig is a successful political writer in Washington, the veteran of a thousand think pieces. He's in his late 50s, divorced, a man of regular habits. So, when he's messaged by a young reporter on the trail of a D.C. mediasphere sexual-harassment scandal, the alarm bells tripped aren't the loud and blaring kind. Mainly, he feels sorrow--the accused is Max Lieberthol, years ago Adam's editor and mentor at a magazine that resembles theNew Republic. Adam, a good progressive, initially hits a morally tutting tone (how could Max have been foolish and vain enough to proposition a staffer?), but there's sympathy underneath. He's disappointed, but he wonders: A story like this, about an offense two decades old, committed in a kind of prelapsarian boys-will-be-boys era by an aging lion whose magazine has always had a big reputation, but (after all) a small readership--even in the age of social media, what legs can such a story have? Then--and Kalfus masterfully persuades us that the withholding is not reader-deception but self-deception--Adam begins to recall and recount the context. The accuser, Valerie Iovine, was his closest friend in the office, and Adam was present, outside Max's office, when the incident occurred; Valerie told Adam about it immediately afterward, and he helped to console her. Adam feels duty-bound to confirm that Valerie is telling the truth, and this--he wants us and himself and most of all Valerie to believe--is an act of characteristic rectitude. The book's steadily mounting tension derives from what comes next, as circumstance and Valerie herself require him to excavate more thoroughly his relationship with her, a friendship that grew into a professional intimacy and that then (in Adam's way of seeing it) turned briefly romantic soon before--this having nothing to do with him!--Valerie withdrew from Washington and disappeared into the exile of small-city journalism. A taut, uncomfortable look at a man forced into a reckoning that's much more personal than he'd like. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
