Is Thomas Chatterton Williams’s new book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, about wokeness, or is it the story of 2020? Yes. Is it a memoir, or is it advancing and building an argument? It’s both. Is it a treatise against “anti-racism,” or a general rebuttal of mad, illiberal ideas? A bit of each. It’s a lot of things and not enough of one.

In his most famous book, A Self-Portrait in Black & White: Unlearning Race, Williams used the memoir format to air a core argument. Namely, of the incoherence of race as a contemporary identity, and in favor of color blindness. That’s a more ambitious argument, yet that book worked so well; it was so persuasive and moving because his argument and personal story were so tightly bound together. His life made his case for him, and thus his anecdotes were not a distraction from the argument any more than the argument was imposed upon his story. It was a brilliant memoir and the best brief ever for color blindness. With Summer of Our Discontent, however, he’s making a less novel version of that argument and forcing the story to support it. In fact, his interjections of memoir, such as flying from the United States to Paris, speaking at small colleges, attending French public debates, and staying in boutique hotels, are so elite that they make him seem divorced from the madness he is attempting to write the definitive book on.