You Who Forsake the Lord

“The permanent underworld of American public life,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, “has only ever been captured and distilled by novelists.” The sentiment comes from his review of Harlot’s Ghost (1991), Norman Mailer’s “magisterial bid for dominance” among the fictional literature of U.S government affairs alongside contenders Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959). Hitchens pushed against the notion held by some critics that such work was merely the dramatized white noise of conspiracy theories. The world of covert action, he argued, was best anatomized by novelists willing to “listen for the silent rhythms, the unheard dissonances and the latent connections” and to “ruminate on the emotions and the characters and the motives” of the state. “‘Conspiring,’ after all, means ‘breathing together,’” noted Hitchens, adding: “Why not check the respirations?”