With The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe attempted to capture the zeitgeist of 1980s New York. Inspired by the great 19th-century realist novels of William Thackeray, Emile Zola, and Honore de Balzac, Wolfe crafted his characters as representative types from different segments of society, which he then brought into violent collision.
In his third novel, Christopher Beha, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, aspires to do something similar for the New York of the 2000s, albeit in a quieter, less pyrotechnic mode. The book’s title is The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, and Beha’s characters, like Wolfe’s, are Icaruses flying perilously close to the sun. But Wolfe was a satirist who took a kind of moral satisfaction in his characters’ hubris; Beha casts a more sympathetic and humane eye. His characters are deeply and plausibly human, and that’s exactly their problem.
The novel opens in early 2009. Sam Waxworth, a young data journalist in the style of Nate Silver, arrives in New York. The bottom has just dropped out of the global economy, but things, for Waxworth, are looking great. An algorithm he designed predicted the results of the 2008 election with uncanny accuracy, attracting national attention and landing him a dream job at a prestigious magazine. Waxworth is a fierce empiricist who believes that with enough data, almost any question in life can be quantified: “He tried to attend to the facticity of things. The world, in Waxworth’s view, was a knowable place, once you stripped away the dead tradition and wishful thinking built up over millennia of misunderstanding.”
His first big assignment is a profile of an aging and recently disgraced columnist and sportswriter named Frank Doyle. Doyle is Waxworth’s opposite and, as far as he is concerned, hideously hidebound: an old-style public intellectual who deals in intuition, not data and who writes in lofty abstractions about virtue and greatness and democracy. Waxworth doesn’t respect Doyle as either a pundit or a baseball columnist, but the timing is right for a Lion in Winter-style profile: Doyle has been iced out of polite society after making a racist joke during a sports broadcast. The truth, however, is that Doyle, a liberal-turned-neoconservative and a vocal supporter of the Iraq War, started falling out of public favor a long time ago. His “cancellation,” to use 2020 parlance, is really just a final coup de grace, and he’s the only one who doesn’t get it.
We rapidly meet more characters, each bound to the Doyle family by familial bonds or shared fates. Doyle’s wife, Kit, is an investment banker whose company was wiped out by the financial crisis. Their son, Eddie, is a listless Iraq veteran who has come under the sway of a charismatic street preacher. Their daughter, Margo, is a trust-fund intellectual whose admiration for her father has curdled into shame. Eddie’s childhood friend, a black scholarship student named Justin, has made a fortune in the financial markets; he’s wrestling with the knowledge that not all his money may have been ethically acquired. Crashing everything is Lucy, Waxworth’s wife, who has uprooted her life to follow him to New York only to discover that her husband’s affections have been stolen by another.
The story switches between these seven characters’ perspectives, a ballet Beha manages with considerable skill. Like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which also alternates third-person perspectives, Beha frequently jumps the narrative forward in intervals of a few weeks or months, then flashes back to fill in the intervening time. (Rooney and Beha also share an interest in the cultural effects of the financial crisis.) But where Normal People is terse, relatively short, and conveyed largely in dialogue, Beha’s novel is expansive, detailed, and even slightly buoyant. The worlds inside his characters’ heads are big and persuasively rendered, but the outside world (9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recession, the Obama presidency) is big, too, and it’s coming for them whether they know it or not.
Beha is interested in ephemerality and the way that people fall in or out of step with their times. Waxworth, a data wonk, has stumbled into fame at the exact moment the world craves his brand of empiricism, a synchronicity he mistakenly assumes will last forever. Frank Doyle, the sad, old-media dinosaur, has invested his entire self-worth in the idea of his intellectual and ideological consistency, but, in the post-Iraq world, that same consistency is not only out of vogue but actively suspect. Kit Doyle is realizing that her wealth and her family’s status and security has been built on a mirage: “She understood all at once that everything was about to collapse, and she couldn’t think of any way to stop it.”
And so on. Everyone here is trying to hold onto something and is watching it slip out of their grasp. One of the novel’s central motifs is baseball, the quintessential American sport but also a waning one, the audience and the relevance of which shrink every year.
The index of the title is an actual baseball metric created by “sabermetrics” guru Bill James, which attempts to quantify a pitcher’s acts of accidental self-sabotage. Beha has an easy erudition about him — his first book, The Whole Five Feet, was a memoir of reading the 50-volume Harvard Classics library, and the reader gets the sense that Beha could expound knowledgeably on the history of baseball, the neoconservative moment, the sociology of New York class politics, or the travails of venture-backed digital media. Happily, he resists the urge to treat his novel as a series of stitched-together treatises, instead adding just the right level of detail to flesh out and ground the novel’s world.
If there is one fault in this excellent novel, it might be that it is sometimes too on the nose: We are constantly brought back to its themes and motifs, and its characters tend to meet their foils and talk in loaded, allusive sentences about their differences of worldview. Yet, the overall effect is lovely and satisfying, not pat. The book ends, devastatingly, in the middle of a sentence. I look forward to Beha’s next work.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
