Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: Lorraine Adams's second novel, The Room and the Chair, has the raw materials of the sort of political thriller that has a target superimposed over the Capitol on the cover: a fighter pilot downed over the Potomac as part of a deniable covert program and a nuclear spy trying to get out of Iran, while star journalists and rookie reporters try to connect the dots. But in Adams's hands, the materials stay raw: she scrapes away the outer skin of her characters to bare their complex and contradictory motivations. (Imagine Mary Gaitskill writing a novelization of Syriana.) Adams, a former Pulitzer-winning reporter at the Washington Post whose first novel was the mesmerizing Harbor, writes about her old newspaper (or one that looks a lot like it) with acid affection, and about the capital with high style: "Washington was as louche as any city; it just hid from itself until the heat set it free. Those who made the city's daily bread--accusation--slowed in high temperatures." Adams is an elliptical storyteller, and she doesn't supply some of the satisfactions you expect from such a plot, but the satisfactions she does provide--of character deeply understood, of consequences met or avoided--are intense, surprising, and rare. --Tom Nissley
A Q&A with Lorraine Adams
Question: How did your time as a newspaper reporter inspire The Room and the Chair? Lorraine Adams: I mostly felt like the tenderfoot in a gang of the self-satisfied during my newspaper days. But I got cynical in one way. I saw over and over that the more important something is, the more difficult it is to ascertain and convince not just editors, but a certain Greek chorus of the thinking public, to want to know it. It was often amusing during the 1980s and 1990s, but entirely less so in the last ten years, a decade of warfare. As everyone knows, our wars now rarely take place on a battlefield, but in an international every-space formerly reserved for domesticity. We fight house-to-house, jet-to-house, on buses or trains, down a residential street where people are going about their hapless, hopeful existences. Everyone is something of a warrior and yet no one knows enough about why we fight or where we should fight.
Question: You’ve said that the story that Vera Hastings is writing is an example of the fact that sometimes the best stories never make it into print. Why? Did this ever happen to you when reporting?
Lorraine Adams: Editors think all the best stories get into print. Reporters think not enough of them do. It seems to me that the idea of what constitutes a good story is undergoing tremendous pressure and yet not changing very much for all that pressure. One of the reasons is that newspapers are run by a coterie of people who have the most noble intentions but never seem to get around to innovating. They remind me of Detroit automakers. They have yet to move outside the dozen or so types of stories that in their eyes constitute the "best" stories. Regular human beings not in the coterie recognize that the complicated and contrary world they live in cannot be shoehorned into these types of stories: "Top dog gets his comeuppance," "Little dog prevails against all odds," "Agency fails to connect dots," etc. In a culture where technological innovation proceeds at hyper-speed, breakthroughs in storytelling have been almost non-existent since the 1960s era of New Journalism.
Question: "The Room" is the newsroom, a place you know well from working at the Washington Post for over a decade. "The Chair" is within the military intelligence community. How did you gain so much knowledge about this intelligence community? And why did you link these two worlds--including in the very title of the novel--together?
Lorraine Adams: After my first novel was published in late 2004, I was still in touch with some of the suspected terrorists, and one convicted terrorist, who I had met when researching that novel. As it happened, someone in the military intelligence community appeared one night at a friend’s dinner party. He was curious about some of the people I knew. I was curious about the work he and people like him were doing. I spent years getting to know him and his work and at a certain point he introduced me to someone who, prior to his retirement, had been in charge of special access operational intelligence activities (in common parlance, "black ops") outside the CIA’s purview.
As I said above, I’ve been obsessed with recent changes in warfare and journalism. I knew the newsroom. This man was a window into today’s strange new combat. It gave me a chance to show how two powerful classes in Washington--the writing class and the warrior class--create what we think of as reality. It helped me understand how that "reality" sifts down into the lives of a few individuals.
Question: The events that drive The Room and the Chair forward never actually happened--it is, after all, a novel. But you’ve said that you couldn’t write about this if it wasn’t within the parameters of the novel--or if you were still a reporter for a newspaper. Why? Is there real news in the book?
Lorraine Adams: This individual who opened up the military intelligence world to me never would have spoken to me if I had been a working journalist. Talking to a journalist was outside his experience and taboo for someone like him.
While all the events and characters in the book are fictitious, some of the information about the way military intelligence operates is based on what I learned in my research.. As I was learning about this world, I was surprised what I discovered and that many things were actual and I’d never read about them anywhere.
Question: In the novel, newspapers and other media outlets seem unable to get to--or disseminate--the truth, perhaps especially about military and intelligence stories. Why? What do you think about the way the traditional media covers the military?
Lorraine Adams: The intelligence community worldwide works hard to stay secret. Every so often great reporters like Dana Priest at the Washington Post manage to find out some of the secrets. The rest of it remains unknown. Whether that’s good or bad turns into pretty predictable polemics that as a novelist I’m much less drawn to than questions about how it affects our humanity, and how an individual in that unknown world goes about their daily life.
(Photo © Mary Noble Ours)
Critics agreed that as a political and psychological thriller and newspaper and war novel, The Room and the Chair is "so topical it could be ripped from tomorrow's headlines" (San Antonio Express-News). Although it might not cohere as well as Harbor, it continues the latter's compelling inquiries into terrorism, duplicity, government secrets, and Islamic extremism. However, reviewers disagreed over the writing and plot. Some cited Adams's style as convoluted and overwritten, while others praised her powers of perception; some noted that although Adams renders newsroom politics and culture perfectly, other subplots never fully converge. Still, The Room and the Chair offers an all-too-real--and frightening--insight into our times. If the inner workings of Washington and the practice of journalism within the nation's capitol appeal, this book is for you. Otherwise ...
*Starred Review* The “Room” is a Washington, D.C., newsroom, an arena Adams, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter formerly at the Washington Post, knows well. Adams follows her acclaimed first novel, Harbor (2004), with an intense tale of grim post-9/11 politics and “infinite war.” In prose clipped, eliding, yet darkly poetic, Adams sets in motion a two-pronged story of covert action and power. Mary, a fighter pilot with a devastating family history, cannot understand why her Viper crashes into the Potomac, but a Special Ops director, dubbed the “Chair,” knows all about it, and he isn’t finished toying with her life. Stanley, the paper’s night editor, wonders why the story of the crash receives minimal play, so he puts the rookie, Vera, an African American former ballerina, on the case, while alpha analyst Don rests on his legendary Watergate laurels, hubristically indifferent to the profound unhappiness of his columnist wife. An Iranian nuclear scientist, child prostitutes, cruel ironies in Afghanistan, the collapse of serious journalism, the wretched secret crimes of an immoral shadow government––Adams fits it all into this masterfully constructed, diabolical cluster-bomb of a novel. A searing tale of lies within lies, not without flashes of humor and beauty, that roars to a halt in a haunted room with a sweat-oiled chair. Read with care. --Donna Seaman
Review
“Lorraine Adams is a singular and important American writer. The Room and the Chair establishes this without question: It is remarkable for its ambitions and its achievements. It’s a war novel, a reporter’s novel and a psychological thriller. It encompasses the broadest outlines of our world. . . . It is gutsier and throws a wider net than the topical and gorgeously written Harbor . [It] begins with a plane crash and Air Force pilot Mary Goodwin hanging wounded from a tree in Washington, D. C. . . . From there, it moves through the snows of Hindu Kush to Bagram Air Base, with a detour to [a] 7-star hotel in Dubai. . . . But its center is the room of the title, which is the newsroom of a newspaper not so loosely based on the Washington Post, where Adams used to work. This territory is so accurately and perceptively portrayed that anyone who’s spent time in a newsroom, especially in the era of print under siege, will recognize the unsavory, nauseating mash-up of romance, hatred, rivalry, corruption and (at the same time) the almost saintly quest for truth. . . . There are all kinds of influences at work on this book: One feels the hand (but, gratefully, not the style) of Henry James, of Joan Didion, of Ward Just (Gore Vidal too). Also in the mix are John le Carré and Norman Mailer. (Have they ever been mentioned together before?). The book is about war’s human toll on soldier and civilian, on the guy who pulls the joystick as well as those who are the targets below. . . . The action flies along. The novel is replete with profound offhand remarks about the human condition, some of them so arresting they can make you gasp. The women especially glow with life. Mary is a fully realized heroine, almost Victorian in her decorum, yet lusty beneath the uniform in unexpected ways. Mabel Cannon, wife of the newspaper’s aging star reporter, is frail and vivacious, sexy and insecure. Baby, a teenage prostitute who witnesses the crash, is especially affecting . . . Indeed, one of the triumphs of this book is that it’s a war novel that’s mostly about women. Though often unwitting tools and even more often thwarted, they are the fulcrum of the book, lifting what might otherwise be a dazzling thriller into the realm of literature. . . . Urgent.”
—Amy Wilentz, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Wonderful . . . One of the most thrilling literary novels I've read in years. I read the first 50 pages in a single gasp, then read the next hundred in a sort of awe. Lorraine Adams seems to have it all—a journalist's sharp eye, a poet's ear, a cynic's wisdom and a story-teller's flourish. A touch of DeLillo here, a bit of Elmore Leonard there, some echoes of Martha Gellhorn, but ultimately Adams has a voice all her own. This is a tough, fast and beautiful read."
—Colum McCann, National Book Award Winner for Let the Great World Spin
“An ejection-seat view of the war on terror in the media age, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Lorraine Adams’s page-turner The Room and the Chair maneuvers between cockpit and newsroom, the Potomac and the Panjshir Valley.”
—Vogue
“Sinuous and intricately plotted . . . Fiercely intelligent . . . The Room and Chair is a breed apart: a novel that combines the meticulous reportage of Bernstein and Woodward’s All the President’s Men with the spellbinding poetry and creepy political intrigue of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Indeed, Adams writes such lovely sentences that you must remind yourself just how hard won her powers of perception are. . . . Like a bright angel of clandestine interception, she casts a fabulous spell as she moves among multiple settings and characters, each time pausing just long enough to suggest that nothing is at seems. The novel unfolds at breakneck speed, in the best possible sense. Adams seeks out her characters in their innermost recesses, even as she reveals the elusive ties that bind them together. You won’t find better descriptive writing. Adams evokes the treacherous, starkly beautiful terrain of war-torn Afghanistan and the lurid glitter of Dubai with the dexterity of a champion foreign correspondent channeling Bruce Chatwin. But Adams’s real genius resides in her ability to show at close hand how a dozen-odd, tenuously linked lives play out across the globe. Then, too, there is her vivisection of life inside the newsroom—‘The Room’—of a Washington paper: nothing less than a minor miracle of social anthropology. [Her] unapologetically lush syntax [is] reminiscent of the exquisite John Banville. . . At first blush, The Room and the Chair presents itself as the consummate Washington insider’s novel, if only because Adams’s sly, frequently riotous thumbnail sketches allow insiders to play the name game. Is that Bob Woodward? Is that Dick Cheney? But it would be a shame to lose sight of the novel’s deep implications for life in our time. . . . Time was when the Washington novel—a genre perfected by stylish masterminds such as Gore Vidal and Ward Just, among others—luxuriated in the very Beltway isolationist culture that Adams captures in all its grandeur and grandiosity, and exposes it in all its obsolescence and breathtaking indifference. . . . This novel belongs equally to the realms of artful entertainment and incisive social commentary. With The Room and the Chair, Lorraine Adams has gone a long way toward reviving a moribund genre. And if her stunning portrayal of our uneasy days sounds stranger than fiction, well, that’s exactly the point.”
—Kirk Davis Swinehart, Chicago Tribune
“Most fiction by former newsmen and newswomen adheres to the Mickey Spillane school of aesthetics. Not so The Room and the Chair, which is intellectually challenging and artfully written, bursting with arresting imagery and cultural detail, and buzzing with the inner lives of its many characters. Ambitious in its intent as well as narrative structure . . . If this novel has heroes, they are two women who see there are jobs to be done—missions to be accomplished, truths to be investigated—and do them valiantly in a morally paralyzed world.”
—Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe
“The Room and the Chair is packed with the kind of verbal flourishes that will send the editors of the OED scrambling to update their database. What, for example, would they do with Adams’s perfect use of always in a description of a woman in a dull marriage coming home for another loveless night: ‘She climbed those always stairs’? Her poetic language takes a plot line that has all the requisites of the Washington novel and methodically strips them down. As in the best of Le Carré, this is a world in which nothing is what it seems; but unlike in Le Carré, the drama of the book is as much about hotel rooms exploding in unattractive regions of Iran and mean tween hookers pinching their mothers’ tricks as it is about Adams’s brilliant and innovative use of language. The very title of the book suggests homey domesticity, a novel perhaps set somewhere lovely on Cape Cod or on a Wisconsin farm; but as the book moves forward, the meaning of even these very concrete words, room and chair, becomes charged with unexpected nuance. Finally, in the last few lines of the book, Adams upends the expectations she has so carefully nurtured throughout, providing a creepy and ambiguous denouement that concerns the fate of our heroine, to be sure, but also turns on the even more complicated question of a world’s meaning.”
—Ben Moser, Harper’s Magazine
“Penetrating . . . Provocative . . . There is the familiar pleasure of reading a really good novel, and then there is the greater thrill of reading a novel both topical and important in that way that usually only journalism gets to be. Adams’s The Room and the Chair is suspenseful and transporting—fine, many good novels are—but it is also that rarer thing: part of the conversation about our seemingly endless War on Terror. . . . We turn to journalists to expose skullduggery at the White House, the CIA, and the Department of Defense . . . [But] there is an even greater value to Adams’ spidery, upsetting novel because she forces us to question our trust in Woodward et al., as well as in those Brooks Brothers assassins at Langley. . . . Adams spent 11 years on staff at The Washington Post and she convincingly conveys the crosscurrents of rivalry, pride, and (very occasionally) empathy that prevail in that pressurized atmosphere. . . . The varied settings, intricate plot, and deep cast of characters suggests a cross between Syriana and the fifth season of The Wire—but Adams’ novel is subtler than both. And more deeply felt. Through a roving, omniscient point of view, Adams manages to convey the all-too-human fears and desires of even the more minor players in her drama. This is the great advantage of fiction: It accommodates, more naturally than journalism, the dimension of feeling behind current events. . . . Adams is a limber and inventive stylist, capable of great music and rhythm. [An] exceptional novel.”
—Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast
“Indelible . . . Adams’s book is so topical it could be ripped from tomorrow’s headlines. It’s an inside scoop that reads—given its large cast of characters, its numerous locales and its labyrinthine plot twists—like a much bigger book than its tidy 315 pages. Yet the reader never feels cheated, so good a reporter is Adams, so supple a writer. Adams is master of the quick sketch, whether she is drawing a character with a few telling lines, t...
About the Author
Lorraine Adams is a novelist, critic, and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Her novel Harbor won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, was a finalist for the Orange and Guardian First Book prizes, and was selected as a New York Times Best Book, as a Washington Post Notable Book, and as Entertainment Weekly’s Best Novel of the Year. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and Bookforum and was a staff writer at The Washington Post for eleven years. She lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. WE ARE SHADOW
She heard the air. It sounded like her Mustang on the Interstate. She’d push its tat engine hard for the on-ramp. Dash would vibrate. She’d check mirrors. Trucks were there, scaring her sideways to the shoulder. She’d strain up to speed in the slow lane, flip the blinker to join the faster ones, relax into the drive, and only then would she realize the radio was a ruffle of lost words because the windshield was whistling on high. Air that loud was normal on the ground. Here in the cockpit, it was a sign.
Solar bands, raw dawn beauty, were hours away. Clouds blocked stars. Moon was gone. As for her visor, its night vision just fine on the ground, it’d frizzed out. Green light had gloomed to black. This night, Mary had no horizon.
She checked the head-up display. It said she was at thirty-five thousand feet with her nose tilted two degrees down. So what was the noise?
She toggled up attitude detection. She was pointed to ground at seven hundred miles per hour.
They couldn’t both be right. She moved the stick.
Head-up stayed; attitude changed. She was an arrow straight for earth at the speed reserved for sound.
Her forgetting hands went to the grips to eject.
Some checklist came in time to save her. Gloves: she took them off. Helmet. Second was the helmet. Wait. Should she take her helmet off? She strained. Helmet was on, wasn’t it? No. Hadn’t somebody got a face sheered because the helmet was on? Off, would something she’d forgotten to batten blind her? Faceless or blind. Faceless or blind? Blind. Helmet stayed. She pulled out the oxygen, held on to her breath. Store it, store it. Into the compartment under the seat, she shoved and locked tubes. She released the survival gear in the seat kit. That would have broken her back.
She could not find the four-line release for the chute. Fingers and palms were mumbling all over the surfaces near where the release should have been. It was here. It has been here. Here. Here. She was at twenty-five thousand feet. Belts were flapping all over her chest. She hooked. Another she pulled off, couldn’t, and tied it down instead. She tightened the Koch fittings.
If she couldn’t get the four-line to deploy she would never make it. No, sometimes you make it. The odds were just bad. You could make it. Flailing, that was the thing that could kill you.
She pulled down on the grips.
The windblast threw the helmet from her head. Her earplugs disintegrated and flew like buckshot out a shotgun. Two pens in her pocket became stilettos that scored her chin. Her wallet fired through the bottom of her G-suit, along with a water bottle that busted out of a zippered pocket—missiles both. The laces on her boots plastered into the leather; one of them got through to her ankle, making an arabesque wound. Her watch sank into her wrist until the wind whipped it, and her skin, away and into the atmosphere.
One leg was twisting out of its socket in her right hip. Tendons snapped, one, two; another held. She could not feel any of it. In minutes she saw the city below, old houses in rows, the bowed Potomac, memorial stairs lit white beside it.
There was a crash. The night editor saw it at the top of his screen. Before he could open that story, another story arrived.
The first story said inhabitants of the Watergate heard something in the Potomac like the sound of a ship running aground. The second story said a bus smashed a truck in Potomac, the Maryland suburb. An explosion heard for miles wracked this affluent enclave of the nation’s capital just after midnight. Stanley remembered how he had edited a story the night before last, removed enclave. Someone else had excised it from his copy when he was just starting, the youngest reporter of all. Back then he thought the word couldn’t be used because it sounded like “clavicle,” or collarbone, a long bone curved like the italic letter f. Some editors let enclave stand. He’d built a vocabulary without such chiffons. It was a language of straight timber.
It hadn’t made him a newsman. With more than four decades behind him, he was instead a repository, the memory of the newspaper that had judged him wanting. He knew on which Washington street one murder unfolded and another almost did, which lobbyist’s first partner was someone else’s third, how the vote on appropriations changed something in conference when someone was Speaker. He had accumulated, first on spiral-bound paper, then in steel-case Rolodexes, and later on peach index cards in oak recipe boxes, a way of finding who to ask and what had happened and where they’d been and when they’d mattered. The city-states and principalities he’d chronicled knew nothing of him, but his enlarged understanding had made him their defender. Sometimes, he felt like moat and parapet. The attackers were hyperactive reporters, seasoned editors with tin-cup recollections, the paper itself—an organism sensitive to status, especially its own, but deaf to smaller bells.
The final edition had just closed. The last papers were furling out of warehouses many highways from downtown, where he and the copy chief, the last two working, sat tilted to terminals. From his desk his colleague was distant, featureless across a shaken board of careless desks. The air conditioning, a constant in September Washington, was the one sound. Stanley wore a suit vest over a Mexican shirt. His hair was gray tufts—a sun-scuffed baseball cap was on his head.
Stanley felt as if he sat by the sea. His computer screen, where the newswires sent their stories and bulletins and advisories, was his estuary. He spent his nights judging movement on this inlet. He had become, he thought, an honest estimator of depths. To be sure, there were reporters, the best of them fearless divers; he had to admit even the most middling of them reached an underwater he only imagined. But Stanley liked to think he knew more than they. He had learned to see how the actual of the world sometimes became known, and how, most often, disappeared from told life.
He felt those losses, some he even mourned. He relished that the night editor was one of the countable few who decided what was important enough to discuss publicly. Granted, he signified only in those hours after the last edition closed and before the newsroom—the Room—came to its senses, sometime after ten in the morning. Things at night appeared different in morning; night editors were constantly corrected, and it all rushed into the infinite light stream of amending and shading that continued day-in and day-out to give shape to what the outside world called factual. His contribution was not even a fleck of light in the sun blast of that constant making and unmaking of what might be true.
He looked at his screen again. He Googled to see if blogs had it. Nothing came up but pilot video games. He switched back. Now the wire was saying there was a helicopter accident near the Watergate. A noise like a ship in a river had become a bus in a suburb, an explosion in an enclave, and now a helicopter in the Potomac. This time, “aboard were government employees.” He sent the copy chief a message—See the wire on Watergate crash? She messaged—???? Then added—No bodies. As if answering her thought, Stanley saw the wire had sent another take—“Pilot presumed dead.”
She landed in a tree. From it, Mary could see her Viper—now a fire in the river. In the Washington thrillers she had read so many of as a teenager, she would be a saucy woman. And she would not be in a tree. She would have landed in the water, clung to an outcropping of rocks after being battered by the rapids, and somehow managed to get her mirror, the one in the survival gear she had, in truth, jettisoned, and, flicking its light to the sky, been rescued by a sailor. She’d have been piloting a secret mission, but ultimately, because of dirty politicians, nosy reporters, and heart-of-gold detectives, the reader would see she was not what she seemed.
The Coast Guard was a few minutes away. There were automatic relays that brought them when an F-16 went down. She felt her face—slashed but not too deep to fix. Leg felt numb. She looked down. Her heel was where her toes should be.
For as long as she could remember, the only thing she knew was to do what frightened her the most. She was not aggressive, not technically proficient, not physically self-possessed. So she ran to the military, to the men who didn’t want her there, to the women who were nothing like her, to trials that strafed her nature. She wanted to grow out of herself. She wanted to take the coat of appearances given her by birth and burn it away by will. She had a picture of herself in her mind. All that was left of the cloth shawl of circumstance was smoke. She was a naked figure in its haze, coming out of the soft focus to let the storm come hard as it may.
The walls glowed raspberry, the woodwork gleamed cream. At the base of the broad stone mantel was a collection of frayed bellows. Nearby was a Japanese screen hand-painted with rocks and trees. There were easy chairs in celery with a brushed-silk sheen. On the rumpled linen sofa were pillows made from canary damask, a salvaged Colonial quilt, and, needlepointed on the largest pillow, in a russet explosion, a cascade of begonias. One lamp was a royally yellow Chinese jar touched with jade, on top of which sat a pleated ivory shade. For fun, there was a leopard-print ottoman finished with heavy silk-twisted fringe, some strands of which were a little too long, on purpose, to create a sumptuous sensation as they draped on an antique rug the color of dried bamboo.
The dinner party of Mabel Cannon and Don Grady had gotten as far as the first drink. The guests were people known to be known. ...
