Walter Kirn on How America Lost the Plot

The novelist turns his literary eye to the American story and finds we’re losing our memories under a new imperative to forget.

Recently, Executive Editor Matt Ellison sat down with the novelist Walter Kirn to discuss the narrative forms America understands itself through, and how the disappearance of historical memory is causing its social fabric to disappear as well.

Walter Kirn is an accomplished author and reporter. Among the eight books he has published, two have been made into films—Thumbsucker (2005) and Up in the Air (2009). He has also written for Harper’s, Time, and the BBC, among other publications.

The two discussed how media stories inform reality. Rather than a source for “information,” media acts as a narrative frame for people to inhabit, and the stories that America has been telling itself for the past ten years have led to powerful rifts in society. According to Kirn, “Hard news stories are now media stories in which the most salient element is how something will play and whether it will serve the interest of the good people or the bad people.”

I’m going to stipulate—no one has to agree with me on this, but I have tried the case and come to this conclusion for myself—that between the deceptiveness, the agenda-driven nature, and the social-media-oriented vapidity of the press, it is no longer a reliable source of information about the world. It’s a very good source of information about itself. If you wish to know who’s up and who’s down, who’s in and who’s out, who scored points and lost points, it’s a great scorecard. But if you’re looking to find out what’s going on, it’s a terrible one. In fact, it will actually conceal what’s going on in almost every respect. So I’ve given up on it.

Kirn goes on to contrast this with the community fabric of Livingston, Montana, where he currently lives. There, people tend to learn the news through people they know in their immediate community. There is also a greater degree of civility that comes from this, but also a greater understanding of life’s uncertainties:

If you grow up in farm country, you grow up in a place where everyone has an opinion but the weather has the final say. It’s a place where all sorts of forces exist, which outsiders don’t understand at all, that govern your daily life. If you grow up in rural America, you can’t afford to hate your neighbor or withdraw into tribal groups because your car might break down and someone from one of those groups might be your only hope of getting a ride to the tire store or the gas station.

This is a much healthier alternative to relating to the rest of America through what you read or see online. However, during the pandemic even small towns like Livingston saw this model suffer. You can check out the rest of the interview here.

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