i'm not like you ▣ THE WORKSHOP

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03 skeptic review

1. The thesis

The manuscript is pretending to be a book that has been there. It has not been there. It has read about being there — read Le Carré, read Vallée, read the Stross of A Colder War, possibly read too much Wallace, certainly read whatever 2024-vintage cleared-contractor confessional was making the rounds of New Yorker subscribers in the season the author began composing — and it has assembled, with very considerable skill, a register that wishes to be taken for the residue of an actual life. This is not nothing. The skill is real. But the manuscript believes that the register is the residue, and a careful reader will feel the difference. The book is in love with the idea of a man who has been on a desk for twenty-five years; it has not, itself, been on a desk for twenty-five minutes.

2. The borrowed effects

Read the opening of “The Handler’s Tuesday” and notice what is being asked of you. “The alarm is set for 5:42, because 5:45 is when Karen’s alarm goes off, and the three-minute lead lets me start the coffee without the bedroom door opening on the smell of it.” This is competent. It is also, to a degree that ought to embarrass the author, the opening of every Le Carré protagonist who has ever stood in his kitchen in suburban Surrey at six in the morning thinking about the wife he has slightly disappointed. The cadence — the alarm is set for X because Y is when, and the three-minute lead lets me Z — is Smiley’s cadence: the operative justifying his domestic micro-arrangements in the syntax of a procedural memo, on the theory that this proves he is interesting. Le Carré earned it because he had run agents in Bonn. Here it is a thing the author has tasted in someone else’s prose and decided he likes the flavor of.

“The Polar Researcher” wants to be Lem and At the Mountains of Madness in a single skin and is neither. “The three vertically-stacked diffraction hyperbolae at seventy-meter spacing” — the precise count, the lab-spec specificity — performs the gesture Lovecraft used at Mount Erebus and that Lem used in Solaris: the rational instrument that reports an irrational thing without flinching. The trouble is that Lovecraft was a hysteric clamping down on hysteria, and Lem was a polymath who knew enough oceanography to be wrong interestingly. The author of “The Polar Researcher” is a person who has watched a YouTube video about ice-penetrating radar and has stitched in enough acronyms (RTK, AWI EMR-4, the Pisten Bully) to look credible to readers who will not check. The instrument is a stage prop.

“The Residency” performs, with what I have to call shameless equanimity, the Pale Fire + Borges + Cloud Atlas trick of the document the narrator invents that is already true, complete with a knowing little inner monologue: “She thinks about Borges. She thinks about The Crying of Lot 49.” When the author has the character think Borges, the author has informed me that she does not trust me to notice without help. Borges does not need to be named in any story descended from Borges. Naming him is the literary equivalent of laughing at your own joke.

And the Carlyle memoir — “the maples on the slope below the window are at the orange stage, and the wind is from the northwest, which is the wind that brings the smell of woodsmoke from the Hutchins farm across the valley” — is exactly the opening Wallace Stegner taught two generations of MFAs to write, down to the place-name (Hutchins) calibrated to sound like an actual New England family without being one. Stegner did it because he had grown up on a homestead. The author here has grown up on Stegner.

3. The unearned authority

The 1962 Wexler IG memo is the artifact most exposed by daylight. A few specifics.

A real 1962 Air Force IG memorandum did not look like that. It was not centered. The classification banner was not “COSMIC EYES ONLY // SECRET” — COSMIC was a NATO marking, not a USAF one, and it was paired with TOP SECRET and ATOMAL, not with SECRET. The phrase “Pouch — hand-carry. No teletype. No telephone” is what a 2026 LLM thinks a 1962 control instruction sounded like; what a 1962 IG actually wrote was something flatter and more telegraphic — “BY OFFICER COURIER ONLY” — usually in a header block, not as a freestanding line. The reference scheme “(a) Norfolk Field Office Report of Inquiry…” is plausible. The substantive paragraphs, however, drift into a register that did not exist in 1962 government prose: “the conditions which obtained on the evening of 11 November ought not to obtain in future, and that the discretion which permitted them ought to be circumscribed by written instruction rather than left to the judgment of the responsible officer in the moment.” That is the prose of a 2010s management consultant performing the part of a 1960s general. The actual register would have been three notches drier and would have used the word “prescribed” somewhere, and “in the moment” would not have appeared. “In the moment” is a phrase that entered general management English in approximately 1998.

Worse: there is a basic discrepancy with the Carlyle memoir, which clearly states Wexler died on “a Tuesday afternoon in late September of 1961, at the base of a cliff on the Virginia coast called False Cape.” The IG memo dates the incident “12 November 61.” Either the manuscript needs a fix or the discrepancy is supposed to mean something, and if it is supposed to mean something then it is signaling to a reader who has reading-comprehension capacity the author has, in every other respect, not trusted them to possess. I do not believe it is meant to mean something. I believe a draft was changed in one file and not the other. That is the kind of error a continuity editor catches in the first pass.

The 1989 dictabelt transcript has its own problems. Dictabelts were a Dictaphone product, were superseded by cassette by the late 1970s, and were largely out of federal service by 1989; an audit recording in 1989 would almost certainly be on a microcassette or a reel-to-reel. The “DICTABELT TRANSCRIPTION — REEL 87-432 — TRANSCRIBED BY ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆” header confuses the medium (belt) with the carrier (reel) — the same document calls it both, and within a system that allegedly retains its taxonomy with religious care. The bracketed conventions — [pause, 3 sec] and [unintelligible — n sec] — are a 2010s court-reporter convention, not a 1989 in-house transcription convention; the 1989 convention would have been (PAUSE) in caps, or no notation at all, with timestamps along the left margin in the format 00:02:13. Also, “Section 11 — Internal Handler Telephone Audit” on a routine internal recording is the kind of label a worldbuilder writes; an actual internal taxonomy would have used a number, a date code, and the audit’s docket — not the operational name of the desk being audited, which is exactly what the cover would not expose to the transcription pool.

The 1981 Roswell-road letter is the artifact that does this best, and the comparison is instructive. “I drove the rest of the way home and I did not stop and I did not tell Carol when I got in. I went and sat in the kitchen with the light off for a while. That is the part that bothers me almost as much as the rest of it. I am not a man who sits in the dark.” That is competent and earned. It is also, however, exactly the voice of every Annie Proulx widower since 1993, and the writer should be aware of the debt.

4. The literary tics

There is a single hand behind all nine voices, and once you see the tics you cannot unsee them.

Tic one: the small declarative trailing sentence as paragraph-closer. “She did. It did. He went.” shapes. Constantly. Story 1: “She picks up tortillas.” / “It will return.” / “She forgets to.” Story 2: “The interaction is over. It has taken approximately eleven seconds. I sign the joint-presence line on the form and I go back up the stairs.” Story 4: “She drinks half of it. She sits back down.” Story 7: “She did not write anything else. She closed the notebook. She put her hand back on his.” This is a Denis Johnson move (a Marilynne Robinson move, before him) and the author has set it as the default termination for every paragraph that wants resonance. It is the literary equivalent of a sitcom button. After three stories it stops working. After nine it is comedy.

Tic two: the triadic “the X and the X and the X” cadence. Story 2: “the §6 line and Karen’s lasagna and Maddy’s chem quiz.” Story 3: “about Greta’s we need a move on this, and she thinks about Devraj saying don’t write the next memo, and she thinks about the duty cycle, eleven on, forty-nine off.” Story 5: “the smell of the firepit and the conversation his sister had with the ranger about whether their permit covered the side canyon. She remembers all of it.” Story 6: “the documents and the laptop and the Backblaze and her mother in Edison and Anika across the river and Marisol at Wired and a half-finished pitch in a Google Doc and a battery the Genius Bar wants four hundred dollars to replace.” This last one is the giveaway. It is McCarthy-via-Egan-via-everyone, the rhythm of and as a substitute for selection. Selection is the hard part of writing. The author has, across nine stories, decided that piling is selection.

Tic three: “the color of [wet/struck/brushed] X.” This must be flagged on the first page of any edit. Story 2: “the color of wet stone” (the technician’s skin). Story 3: “hair the color of brushed nickel” (Greta — twice across two stories; she reappears in Story 6 with the same hair, presented to a different POV character who clocks it the same way). Story 5: “the Organ Mountains the color of a struck match.” Story 7: “The light on the wall was the color of weak tea.” Story 8: “the blue of a New England January at five-thirty.” It is the same author admiring the same trick from every available angle, and “the color of wet stone” in particular is the kind of phrase that needs to be earned by not using “the color of [X]” anywhere else in the book.

Tic four: the bracketed-meta self-correction. This is the most distracting and the most damning, because it reveals the author seeing himself write. Story 8: “She means the foil pans neighbors leave.” — the writer correcting herself from casseroles on the page. Story 2: “the way a heron’s patience does not read as human patience” — the qualifier that closes off the simile after the simile has been deployed. Story 3: “third option, which she would not have considered five years ago and which she considers now in the slow lane of the toll road…” The interruption of one’s own thought while in one’s own thought is a Wallace tic, and Wallace used it because he was performing the manic interior of a manic intelligence. The handlers and analysts and grandfathers in this book are not manic. They are calm professionals. They should not be parenthesizing themselves into the next paragraph. They do it because the author cannot stop doing it.

Tic five (bonus). The time-stamped quotidian — “At 1612” / “At 14:18” / “at 7:34” / “at 1847” — across at least four stories. Le Carré used military time once or twice in a Smiley novel and the world has not recovered. Used in every story it begins to look like a man putting on a uniform he has only seen in photographs.

5. The cosmology’s structural cheating

The cosmology has a doctrine — implicit in Story 1, where most of Marisol’s days carry no signal, and explicit in Story 8, where Joan thinks “there is almost nothing that comes from nowhere. The skill is in the rearrangement” — that uncanny experience is mostly noise. The manuscript does not honor this doctrine. The manuscript cheats.

Every owl in the book is an owl-shaped marker placed by the apparatus to bind a redacted memory. Every coincidence is a real coincidence. The Audubon Snowy Owl in the conference room (Story 3) and the sticker in the kitchenette (Story 3) and the etched owl in the glass at the Reston interface (Story 2) and the owl-on-fencepost-via-Blanding (Story 1) and the carved owl on the highway exit sign (Story 2) and Joan’s invented operator-class interface signature, owl-form (Story 8) — they all tessellate. They all mean. The book is, on this evidence, a book in which every owl is the owl. This is the structural cheat. A book that wants to honor the doctrine that most uncanny experience is noise needs to show us noise. It needs at least one prominent owl, in at least one prominent scene, to mean nothing. Otherwise the book is not, as it advertises, a story about how an apparatus is glimpsed through hundreds of casual non-significances; it is a story in which a kindly worldbuilder has placed every single Easter egg on the table where the protagonist will find it.

Same problem with the recurring numbers. 14.7 Hz. 11-on / 49-off. 7.04 Hz. PCT-0173. Every seven years. They all line up. None of them turns out to be a red herring. None of them turns out to be a thing the cosmology has nothing to do with. The maintenance schedule of the actual universe has more chaff than this. A book that knows the actual universe has chaff would put chaff in.

6. The character work that is actually thin

Maren, in Story 3, is the least real person here. She is, on inspection, a job description that has been given a fridge. Her grandmother does not exist; her parents do not exist; the only person who exists in her life is a co-worker named Devraj who is leaving for a competitor and who delivers, in the kitchenette, a paragraph of expository monologue so frictionless it could be cut directly into the book’s jacket copy: “The grandfather generation had three networks, two wire services, and a Walter Cronkite. They could put a lid on anything. We have fifty thousand creators with subtitle generators and a foundation model that will explain Bennewitz to a high-schooler in eleven seconds.” That is the book talking. A character in a novel about media manipulation does not, having just been told by his boss he is being fired, deliver the thesis statement of the chapter over a Keurig. He behaves badly. He says something cruel. He cries in his car. Devraj is not in the room with Maren; Devraj is a voiceover the manuscript needs.

Maren herself is given exactly two interior gestures: she does not look at the Audubon (significant), she does not open the box (significant). Both gestures are about the cosmology, not about her. We do not learn whether she has been in love. We do not learn what she does on Saturdays. We do not learn — and this is the test — what she would lose if she lost the job. We learn that she would lose the cosmology. The cosmology is the character. The character is the cosmology’s medium. This is the inversion that makes Story 3 the weakest of the nine; Story 6 (Reema) and Story 4 (Elin) escape this trap because they are given, respectively, a mother in Edison and a husband whose architecture practice is failing.

7. The set pieces that are too easy

(a) “The Polar Researcher” / the radar return that has changed shape between seasons. This is the core conceit of Annihilation — the lighthouse footage, the topographical anomaly that grows. It is also the structural conceit of The Andromeda Strain (the instrument that measures the wrong thing) and of half of M. John Harrison’s Light. The author has not added anything to the conceit that the precursors did not have. Worse — the precursors staged the discovery as drama, with at least one character whose disbelief mattered. Elin is alone at the screen. The drama is interior. Crichton would have killed off a Russian by page eight.

(b) “The Permeable Records” / the journalist who notices the same officer signing on two letterheads. This is the opening of All the President’s Men in spirit (one detail not matching another) and the opening of every “lone reporter realizes she is being noticed” thriller of the last forty years. The specific gimmick — the NextDoor app installed without permission — is competently rendered but it is the Mr. Robot move (the small civilian platform compromised as a sign of surveillance), and the author should know the audience for this book has seen Mr. Robot. The redaction-bar that has grown a millimeter is good. The NextDoor banner is from the central casting department.

(c) “The Residency” / the novelist whose invented cosmology turns out to be real. This is Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The author names Borges, which I have already complained about. The set piece — the editor’s email referencing the phrase the author has just invented — is Tlön, photocopied, and one cannot photocopy Tlön and improve on it. The author needed to pick a different set piece for this story or to commit to the Borgesian conceit with the courage to follow it through the floor; instead the chapter ends with a hovering cursor, which is the cinematographic translation of a literary effect that does not survive cinematography. End on the sentence — on the inventory of what the author cannot account for — not on the cursor.

8. The artifacts

I have already cited the Wexler memo (anachronistic register, NATO-classification error, “in the moment,” date discrepancy with the memoir). The 1989 dictabelt has its medium problem and its bracket-convention problem. Two more.

The 1981 letter. This is the strongest of the artifacts. It earns its small details (the JV at Goddard — Goddard High in Roswell; the puppy from a feed sack out by Dexter; Aunt Joan and the hip and the jello). It earns the texture of having been written by a man who is frightened and who has decided not to be frightened on the page. It has one false note. “It was inside the wash of my headlights for maybe two seconds, three at the outside.” The phrase “three at the outside” is correct mid-century American English. The construction “inside the wash of my headlights” is too writerly for the speaker the rest of the letter establishes — a man who sells supplies in Hagerman and writes to his sister about the apricot bars. He would have said “my headlights caught it” or “it was in the headlights for maybe two seconds.” The “wash” metaphor is the author’s hand visible through the seam. One word, easily fixed.

The Leadville Herald-Democrat, October 23, 1967, Page B3. The headline “STRANGE LIGHTS REPORTED OVER MOSQUITO RANGE” is plausible but the deck — “Sheriff’s Office Receives Twelve Calls in Three Hours” — uses a numbers-in-the-deck construction that became dominant in American papers around 1985, when desktop editors started preferring numerals; in 1967 most regional dailies still wrote numbers under a hundred as words in deckheads (“Twelve Calls in Three Hours” is fine, but the deck would more likely have read “A Dozen Calls Received Within Three Hours”). More serious: the byline “By J. Margolis, Staff Correspondent” — in a 1967 small-town Colorado daily, “Staff Correspondent” was for the out-of-town stringer; the local reporter would be “Staff Writer.” “Correspondent” is the AP convention, and the Leadville Herald-Democrat was not paying AP rates in 1967. Also, Mrs. Klepac is 47; she has been teaching the junior class at the First Methodist Sunday School; she gives a four-sentence quote in flawless period prose. The quote is too good. Real local witnesses, even articulate ones, did not in 1967 say “contrary to the behavior of either aircraft or the meteor showers common to the season.” The reporter wrote that. The piece does not signal that the reporter wrote that. The piece presents it as direct quote. This is the artifact betraying that the period-mistake is not the date or the headline but the anthropology — the manuscript does not know how a regional paper handled a witness in 1967, which is by paraphrase and selective sentence-completion, not by transcription.

The postcards. Three postcards, one signature L., postmarked Marfa / Truth or Consequences / Tonopah in October 2019. The postmark price is 35¢. In October 2019 the U.S. domestic postcard rate was 35¢ (it had gone to 35¢ in January 2019). This checks out. Good. The Marfa stamp shows USA / 35¢ on a green diamond — fine. But: the addresses are to “Dr. Helen Carlyle / Wesleyan University / Middletown, CT 06459.” Wesleyan is on High Street, not 238 Church Street; the postcard has confused Wesleyan with somewhere else. (238 Church Street, Middletown is not a Wesleyan building.) That is the kind of error a reader who went to Wesleyan will catch in three seconds. Fact-check the address.

The 2024 email thread. Best of the contemporary artifacts. The CUI-marking and the NISPOM citation are correct. The S/MIME footer is correct. The “Sentinel Cartograph LLC is a cleared contractor (Facility Clearance Level: SECRET)” and the “Cleared-facility communications are subject to monitoring under DoD 5220.22-M (NISPOM)” are competently rendered. The one error: “Records Schedule N1-330-14-002” is given identically across all four signatures from three different organizations. A real Records Schedule would be different per agency (DoD vs. contractor vs. liaison office). The boilerplate is too uniform across senders. This is the kind of mistake an LLM makes that a human paralegal would catch.

9. The Easter eggs problem

L. ▆▆▆▆▆▆▆▆, PCT-0173, CASE 24-LMA-007, the False Cape geography, the Bennewitz acoustic annex, the 11/49 duty cycle, the implant at the angle, the staff car flag, the Mosler Class 5 safe, Helen Carlyle signing the redactions in 2021, Helen Carlyle receiving the postcards in 2019, Helen the daughter who told the memoirist that the designations were declassified in 1998, Marisol-the-tech (Story 1) and Marisol-at-Wired (Story 6), Joan inventing operator on her own (Story 8) and the apparatus actually using operator (Story 2), Suite 312 and J. Roberts showing up in Story 7’s deathbed disclosure from a 1962 child encountering a man in October 1991.

These are doing genuine connective work — particularly the dying father naming J. Roberts in Reston, Virginia, in something called the Logistics Support Group (Story 7), which is the same suite the handler in Story 2 walks past every morning. That is real connective tissue, because it is a connection the reader makes in the next chapter without the manuscript pointing at it. That’s earned.

The Easter eggs that are worldbuilder’s vanity are the ones where the same proper noun is dropped into two characters’ interior monologues so that the reader can high-five themselves for noticing. Marisol in Story 1 and Marisol in Story 6 share the name and nothing else — different ages, different jobs, different ethnicities arguably — and the name-repetition is signal in search of a referent. Helen Carlyle’s appearance in three different documents across forty years is at the upper limit of what one character can do as connective tissue; she is everywhere, and her being everywhere starts to feel like the device’s only structural integrity. There needs to be a Helen Carlyle scene. She cannot remain a name in everyone else’s archive forever, or she becomes the structural cheat — the always-offstage authority that makes every artifact authoritative without anyone having to do the work.

Verdict: about 60% connective tissue, 40% vanity. The vanity becomes more visible the more artifacts the book accumulates. Trim, and the connective tissue strengthens.

10. The honest cuts

A real editor cuts, not trims:

11. What the manuscript IS doing that I would defend

I have been harsh, and I have meant to be, but the book is not a fraud. The book is a sketch of something a real editor would in fact work to save, because the bones are good. Three things:

The doctrine. The cosmology behind the book — that there is an apparatus, that most of what we perceive is a kind of low-fidelity render budget administered by a constituency that has been here as long as we have, that the disclosure is being paced and not suppressed, that the handlers are not villains and the operators are not gods — is a more sophisticated cosmology than the genre usually offers. It is recognizably a position. It earns the long form. The manuscript is, at the level of doctrine, an actual contribution and not a recombination.

Story 5 — “The Summer at Pop’s.” Mostly. The cumbia dance is the manuscript at its absolute best — the gift Pop is putting into her hands is rendered without the cosmology needing to say what it is, and the reader does the work, and the work is real. The story falters only in the last paragraph (see above), but the body of it is the kind of fiction that justifies the whole. The closed-up phone calls, the locked drawer, the not-asking-because-she-was-raised-to-know-which-questions-were-her-business: these are not cosmology serving character; these are character that the cosmology will later turn out to have been touching, which is the correct vector. The other stories should have studied this one.

The Carlyle memoir. Despite its Stegner debts, Chapter 4 is the best of the document-objects. The line “the founders thought of the visitors as a population with interests we were obliged to take account of, in the way one takes account of a voting bloc” is precise, dry, slightly funny, and earns the cosmology more than fifty pages of handler-desk procedure does. The conceit that the early apparatus was improvisational and personal — that it was nine men with a Royal Quiet De Luxe — is the conceit that justifies the apparatus’s later bureaucratic mass. That conceit needed to come from a memoirist and it does. The book is, in this chapter, in the hand of a writer who has, here, briefly, been there.

The doctrine that the disclosure is being paced by the operators, not suppressed by the handlers. This is the manuscript’s actual claim, and it is the claim that no other UFO novel of the present cycle has made. Whatever the prose costs of the rest, this idea is worth a book.

Required terminal report

Most over-performed sentence: “They are not gray in the cartoon sense. They are the color of wet stone.” (Story 2.) This is the manuscript in miniature: the small denial of the obvious-bad-version, followed by the cooler/literary-sounding alternative, followed by the implicit invitation that the reader admire the choice. “The color of wet stone” is a phrase you read in a London Review of Books review of someone else’s book, with the reviewer rolling their eyes.

Artifact most exposed by period-research: the 1962 Wexler IG memo. COSMIC used with SECRET (taxonomically incorrect for 1962 USAF), the late-twentieth-century management English in paragraph 3, the September/November date discrepancy with the memoir, and the Air Materiel Command designation — AMC was redesignated Air Force Logistics Command in 1961, so by February 1962 the letterhead should read AFLC, not AMC. A real editor catches that in the first pass.

Recurring tic most distracting: the small declarative trailing sentence as paragraph-closer — “She did. It did. He went.” — used as the default termination across all nine stories. It is the tic the author cannot see in himself, and it is the tic that gives the personae away as a single hand. Once flagged, every closing paragraph in the book reads like a magician’s reveal. Strip ninety percent of them and the remaining ten percent will, again, mean something.