On January 6, 2021, Twitter locked out Donald Trump. As his supporters mobbed the Capitol where Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s victory, he was tweeting that he had won the election. Two days later, Twitter made the ban permanent: “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them—specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter—we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” A joke went around: by deleting Trump’s prolific account, Twitter had burned a modern Library of Alexandria. “There’s always a tweet,” the meme used to go. Not anymore.
A year later, I find it uncanny to encounter Trump’s tweets again, no longer on the screen but frozen on the pages of Amitava Kumar’s novel A Time Outside This Time. The novel’s narrator is Satya, an Indian-born American journalist and writer who, like Kumar, is at work on a novel about fake news. “Am I right in thinking,” asks Satya, “that by bringing news into literature we make sure that daily news doesn’t die a daily death?” The novel becomes a bulwark against forgetting, with Satya’s story playing out against the backdrop of breaking-news ephemera. He calls the inclusion of these fragments “slow news,” a practice in which he bears witness to the daily outrages. Because Satya knows how fast lies metastasize into violence, he makes deceleration a deliberate practice.
As a form, the novel is slow to write, slow to read, and as a work of fiction, it embodies the very antithesis of breaking news. But often, writes Satya:
“… our world comes to us as bad fiction. Toni Morrison read The New York Times every day with pen in hand, making corrections she felt necessary, deleting words or inserting them as she went along. I thought I could start with that idea, a novel about reading the news, but the pencil marks would be found everywhere, not only on the newspaper. Scientific experiments, for instance, or a writer’s memoir about writing, and, why not, our relationships and the way we live our everyday life.”
A Time Outside This Time is a bold, strange collage that defamiliarizes and reframes the news of the Trump era — those updates that were woven into our everyday lives. I hesitate to call the novel autofiction; Kumar doesn’t indulge in privileged navel-gazing here. It’s more like he’s dipping into the long history of the novel for the way it has always toyed with fact and fiction. The metafictional conceit brings to mind the earliest novels’ insistence on their own veracity, such as those of Daniel Defoe, but in reverse: Kumar insists on the fictionality of his news-packed book. In doing so, he resists the fetishization of facts that was one of the more feckless responses to Trumpism. Kumar has a deep reverence for journalists (he is one). And yet A Time Outside This Time proposes an antidote to fake news that isn’t the mere recitation of more facts, but rather subjectivity. Unlike much journalism with its pretense of objectivity, Satya knows that his mind is the funnel for the flood.
I admit that reliving these frenetic years may be tedious. Some reviewers have faulted the novel for the way it revives the push alerts. But they also neglect what Kumar has invested in his narrator’s rich inner life. Satya is more diarist than archivist. As with many diarists, he uses the happenings of the day as occasions to plumb personal histories and follow trains of thought that no reader could anticipate. Satya’s voice is compelling — somehow both erudite and casual, and yet also capable of heart-stopping lyricism (“A lot of life is left in a man being killed”). He is by turns funny (he calls his wife’s ex a “vomitous colostomy bag”) and poignant (in many asides, Satya reveals a quiet affection for animals, and empathy for their suffering). His sentences are a consistent pleasure.
In a series of early masterful chapters, Satya begins in his present — a writer’s retreat in early 2020 — but quickly swerves into his past. We follow his memories of a young India, haunted by Partition, in which “on seemingly mundane days of my childhood the armies of ordinary citizens were being readied for battle and even milkmen carried swords.” Next, he recalls his tortuous encounters with a Pakistani immigrant who had been arrested and incarcerated after 9/11. Then he revisits a winding investigation of a Naxalite insurgent’s killing.
These chapters recall a sensibility that Kumar describes in Every Day I Write the Book (2020), his call for bold style in academic prose. (Kumar, like Satya, writes journalism, fiction, and scholarship, regularly blurring distinctions among these genres.) Kumar describes the ideal of “academic interest” as “a stubborn holding on to complexity” (a phrase from Stuart Hall) and “a refusal of easy consolations.” The stories in A Time Outside This Time share this quality. They each have high stakes and little closure, forcing the reader to sit with ambiguity. They are propulsive—the threat of danger and promise of discovery lurk everywhere — but these “experiments with truth” ultimately raise more questions than they answer.
One underlying question unites the many fragments of this novel. It’s Satya’s own: “Who among your neighbors will look the other way when a figure of authority comes to your door and puts a boot in your face?” This might seem like an alarmist abstraction for some because of their race, religion, or wealth. But in so many of Satya’s stories, the nightmare scenario — the figure who comes knocking — isn’t speculative. It is living memory. On the recent spate of rumor-fueled murders of Muslims by Hindu mobs, Satya writes, “Fake news leads to lynchings — and then what? Where is the writer to find evidence of life?”
The second half of A Time Outside This Time has surreal elements as Satya narrates the cascading crises of 2020. If George Orwell’s 1984 is a key text for Satya as he studies the epidemic of fake news, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is a fitting analogue for the final chapters. Satya catalogs the traumatic onset of the pandemic in vivid details that we haven’t yet forgotten — the run on groceries, the makeshift morgues. And the news keeps coming: Derek Chauvin murders George Floyd, protesters take to the streets, the election ends with Biden’s victory and Trump’s Big Lie.
Kumar’s novel urges us to see how we’ve all been “primed” for the present by our personal histories. “I have my biases,” writes Satya. “I was primed for it by the global war on terror.” Others are primed by the media they consume, the work they do, the indignities or violence they suffer or witness. How will our present moment prime us for the future, for a time outside this time? This unanswerable question is the weird engine of this novel, which I expect will read differently in one year, or five, or twenty.
This novel’s ending will deeply unsettle some readers, I think, because it offers no closure. But this is another deliberate “refusal of easy consolations”: the novel lacks closure because we lack closure. Some readers might feel as if Kumar is regarding Trump in the rearview mirror, but the political and cultural storm that Kumar explores is not over. Surveillance capitalism still amplifies the lies of demagogues. Hindutva and white nationalism persist. Trumpism smolders. The pandemic rages. Satya’s time is still our own. We’re not beyond the storm; we are in its eye. Kumar has written an urgent manifesto for slow news and a love letter to the novel. We need both for what’s coming.
[Published by A. A. Knopf on October 5, 2021, 272 pages, $27.00 hardcover]