After the furor, or because of it?

All club members now have their copies of our November book of the month, Jon Ronson’s The Castle—and I know at least some of you have cracked it open already. But even if you haven’t had a chance to start reading, I wanted to take some time this week to point you towards a handful of elements that made this a standout book to me.

Before we get to that, though, I’d like to tell you about a new project I’ve started. It’s called “Bobbie Johnson’s Faking It” 

I’ve been working on a book that looks at the long-running conflict between authenticity and fakeness throughout history. And for the last year or so I’ve been digging into some fascinating stories to work out how we got to now, interrogating how we’ve tackled explosions of unreality in the past, and trying to figure out how we might navigate our current moment.

While it’s still a work in progress (no book deal yet) I am starting to share some of those ideas publicly in a new, free newsletter, the first installment of which was released on Friday. Please subscribe: if you like these emails then you might enjoy those ones too.

Now, back to our scheduled programming—with three things that I loved about The Castle.

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The author’s in the story the whole time

Sometimes Ronson’s work gets called gonzo journalism—the form where the reporter becomes the protagonist in the story, rather than merely a participant or an observer of what’s happening. The approach is most associated with Hunter S Thompson, a whirlwind writer whose ability to pull readers into his point of view really shifted a lot of the boundaries of non-fiction writing.

I wouldn’t classify The Castle as a full work of gonzo journalism, though: yes, he tells you the story almost as if he’s spinning you a yarn over dinner, and yes, it is absolutely written from his point of view. But your entire experience isn’t filtered through his eyes, it’s not submitted to total subjectivity.

Still, though, he’s in the story the whole time, narrating and showing you what he sees. But the distance between the action on the page and Ronson’s feelings about the situations he finds himself in are what creates some of the funniest and most poignant moments in the story. He’s writing a book about men who have lost purpose while struggling with what happens when he has lost—or fears losing—his own purpose.

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The author arrives without judgment

Ronson is never neutral, but he’s also not judgmental, and this leads him into spots that other people would probably not arrive at. In the past this has meant hanging out with jihadists, conspiracy theorists, weirdos, outsiders, and strange people who have been scrubbed from the public discourse. In The Castle, it means spending time with a creepy millionaire and his crew among others. But being in the room doesn’t just let him see inside, or show us what goes on behind closed doors; it also allows him to ask questions that other people wouldn’t put themselves in a position to. 

For example, talking to the comedy-writer-turned-online-troll Graham Linehan, a man most people have turned away from, allows Ronson to show the toll that Linehan’s angry, obsessive anti-trans activism has taken on him as well as the people around him and his targets. That section is one of the standout moments of the book for me.

On a bigger level, the lack of judgment can also feel a bit like a lack of a thesis, and that can be a little frustrating. Sometimes the disparate threads felt like a handful of vignettes about random people linked sometimes by very thin connections—one link, for example, really amounts to “Greg lives in a decaying post-industrial rust belt town that is not too different from the one that Mark’s great-grandfather built.” But eventually, juxtaposing these stories together does make a subtle argument, or at least, it asks you to think about what the answers might be.

The author looks again at things you think you know

I thought the strongest story in the book wasn’t actually the one about Chris Mark and his odd castle (though obviously that provides the central construction.) The most powerful story to me was about lawncare influencer-turned kids YouTuber- turned recluse Greg Chism. 

When Ronson meets with Chism and recounts his story with all its ups and downs, I realized I’d almost completely forgotten the “Elsagate” scandal from late 2017. This was a moment when some harsh truths about YouTube’s horrendous and exploitative kids’ algorithm emerged, and the scandal was propelled in major part by an essay from the artist and critic James Bridle called “Something is wrong on the internet” which outlined the awful stuff that was being served to children. 

I actually followed this story at the time, both as an acquaintance of Bridle and a writer about technology and society. The details and shapes of the story, though, had been pushed to the back of my brain—and the consequences, too.

But Ronson goes back and goes over what really happened, and how it happened, and what the coverage at the time got wrong. (I’ll avoid spoilers, but the short version is that YouTube is a lot more culpable than it would admit at the time.) 

I think there’s a lot of power in revisiting stories after the dust has settled, or at least after the immediate furor has died down, and adding to the complexity… not just recounting the history, but recounting the ways in which the feeding frenzy was wrong. This is something Ronson did with earlier book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and I think it’s actually an under-used mode in non-fiction. 

(Note: If you haven’t got the book, then Chism’s chapter got turned into a New York Times magazine article and is an easy to read version.)

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Anyway. If you’ve read the book, I wonder if you appreciated those same things? Or were there other elements you enjoyed? Let me know by replying to this email.

Onwards

Bobbie