Cicely Tyson plays Carrie Watts in The Trip to Brountiful.

Occasionally, there is an almost uncanny parallel between a player and her role. The journey that actress Cicely Tyson is on at the moment—returning to Broadway after an intermission of three decades—is not so different from the one that her character, Carrie Watts, is attempting in The Trip to Bountiful—getting back to the nourishing roots from which she sprang.

“Someone asked me what I hoped audiences would take away from the play,” Ms. Tyson who, like Watts, is in her 70s, said in a recent interview with The Observer. “I said, ‘The one thing that struck me about this story is the lack of respect and honor accorded elders.’” In the play, Watts is forced to live in cramped quarters with her unwelcoming son and daughter-in-law, who treats her like a maid.

Ms. Tyson was raised in a very different school of values. “I never knew any of my grandparents, but I grew up with a respect for elders,” she said. When her mother had to work, she’d often leave the young Ms. Tyson with one of these elders, a woman she knew as “Nana.” “My respect for this woman has permeated my whole life. It has just spread outward.”

That kind of respect informed Ms. Tyson’s most famous performance to date—that of a slave who ages from Civil War to Civil Rights and celebrates her 110th birthday by drinking from a whites-only water fountain. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman won her two Emmy Awards in 1974 (Actress of the Year and Best Lead Actress in a Drama). A third came 20 years later for Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, in which she played a house slave. In between were the original Roots and a portrayal of Coretta Scott King. In movies, she made her mark depicting a kind of sharecropping Mother Courage in Depression-era Louisiana in Martin Ritt’s Sounder.

But there have not yet been indelible marks on Broadway for Ms. Tyson, just hen-scratches—seven fast shows lasting a total of 110 performances—and this could be the impetus for her Broadway comeback. It certainly doesn’t hurt that she is making it in a role she has coveted for 28 years.

After she saw the 1985 movie, she said, “I told my agent, ‘You get me my Trip to Bountiful, and I’ll retire.’”

He didn’t, but eventually the role of Carrie Watts found her. “There was a regional production, I believe in Cleveland,” said Michael Wilson, the director of the current revival. “It wanted to explore the family as black, so they contacted [writer] Horton [Foote]’s daughter, Hallie Foote, for permission. She asked me what I thought of it, and I said, ‘I think it’ll work very well.’ Then, she said, ‘Do you think it’ll work very well on Broadway?’ I said, ‘Sure, if you get Cicely Tyson ...’”

After she was cast, the rest of the ensemble fell into place—Cuba Gooding Jr. and Vanessa Williams for the son and daughter-in-law, Condola Rashad as a soldier’s wife she encounters en route and Tom Wopat as the sheriff sent to retrieve her.

“She has such a deep connection to the character, to the story,” Mr. Wilson said. He called the casting “Cicely doing what amounts to her King Lear.”

BEFORE REHEARSALS began, Ms. Tyson inspected the Texas that Mr. Foote wrote about so lovingly—in and around his hometown of Wharton—with his daughter serving as tour guide and interpreter. “She interviewed a lot of people down there and got a sense of the place,” said Hallie Foote. “Where Bountiful might have been, what it was like to be there.

“My dad would be thrilled she’s doing this play. She’s the kind of actor he adored. He loved her work—especially Sounder. This whole cast gets his world. In this version, you can see what a universal play it is, how it spans generations, how it spans race.”

Lillian Gish was the first to take the trip to Bountiful—on television, in less than an hour—in March of 1953. Eight months later, Mr. Foote expanded that teleplay into three acts for a month’s ride on Broadway with Ms. Gish. Elia Kazan evidently caught the play and turned two of its little-known actresses into the back-to-back Best Supporting Actress Oscar winners in ’54 and ’55, Eva Marie Saint and Jo Van Fleet.

Carrie Watts didn’t get her Oscar-winning portrayal until Geraldine Page played her in 1985, and Lois Smith also cleaned up in the role in a 2005 Off Broadway revival, winning all four awards for which she was eligible.

Which still leaves a Tony for Ms. Tyson to take home. And it will have been a long time coming. Her last Broadway outing, 30 years ago, was as Miss Moffat in The Corn Is Green, and she creditably filled the high-button shoes worn by the likes of Ethel Barrymore, Eva Le Gallienne, Wendy Hiller, Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn.

The only downside to this “color-blind casting” was that Ms. Tyson sometimes did not get entrance applause. The set was already cluttered with soot-covered Welshmen less-than-fresh from a hard day in the coal mines. By the time the audience realized The Star had arrived, the moment was lost. But it speaks volumes for her talent that great roles gravitate to her, like this late-blooming Carrie Watts. She can’t say why or how it happens, but “I consider that a blessing, believe me when I tell you.”

Ms. Tyson started out as a fashion model, discovered by an Ebony magazine photographer who found her at a hairstyle show that her beauty-salon operator persuaded her to enter.

She made her stage debut in a YMCA production of Dark of the Moon that was directed by her acting teacher at the time, Vinnette Carroll—one of many distinguished African-American artists with whom she has worked over the years.

Another one she met at that very first table reading was Roscoe Lee Browne, who played the minister in the show. “I was so frightened, I sat there with the script up in my face,” she recalled. “He would take my hand down and say, ‘You are going to be marrrrrrvelous.’ He kept doing that—throughout my whole entire career, I do believe. I miss him.

“In those days, they would have on Broadway every year a show called ‘Talent’ for that year—Talent ’59, Talent ’60 and so on, and one of the scenes from Dark of the Moon was selected to be in Talent ’59. And that was my first exposure to Broadway.”

Her first Broadway credit, also in 1959, was as Eartha Kitt’s understudy in a nine-
performance wonder called Jolly’s Progress. She never went on. “She never spoke to me,” she said of Ms. Kitt, “and I would never approach her unless she said something to me. One day I was outside her dressing room and heard her on the phone. She said, ‘Who? Cicely? Oh, my goodness, she has to be a fantastic actress.’ I didn’t even think she knew my name.”

Next was The Cool World, a play in two acts—and two performances, followed by her longest Broadway run to date. Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright lasted—despite the backstage battles (director Joshua Logan vs. star Claudia McNeil)—33 performances between December 1962 and January 1963. “Oh, my dear! For the first time, I was made aware how tumultuous these stage plays can be backstage. I suppose it’s the nature of the instrument of the artist.”

Her Off Broadway career was happier. In 1961, she was among the original cast of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, which, at 1,408 performances, was the longest-running Off Broadway non-
musical of that decade. “It started avant-garde here.”

1968’s Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, Sidney Poitier’s one and only Broadway-directing effort, and 1969’s Trumpets of the Lord, a musical based on Langston Hughes’s God’s Trombone, each threw in the towel after seven performances, and Ms. Tyson swore off Broadway for the next 14 years.

Mr. Poitier took her out for some vino and sympathy when Trumpets closed. “We went to a restaurant, and I said to him, ‘Sidney, I’m finished. This is it. I can’t do this anymore. I cannot. It is like having a miscarriage. You work, you carry a child for close to nine months, then suddenly you lose it. That’s what happened with Trumpets. I’m just going to quit and leave this business.’ He looked at me for the longest time, and he said, ‘And do what, Cicely?’ I’ll never forget it. He’s the reason I’m still here.”

editorial@observer.com

Bobby Cannavale and Ana Reeder in The Big Knife.

There was once a time—and 1949, when Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife premiered on Broadway, seems to have been that time—when an angry and politically inclined writer could meaningfully point out that Hollywood is both corrupt and corrupting, that movie stars make entertainment and not art, and that studio bosses are craven businessmen. In 2013, however, these notions are truisms, and that six-decade disconnect leaves Mr. Odets’s noir-tinged moralistic melodrama, which opened last night in a Roundabout Theatre Company production at the American Airlines Theatre, as empty as the once-idealistic matinee idol at its center.

Charlie Castle (Bobby Cannavale), né Charlie Cass, is the biggest male star at Hoff-Federated Studios, and he’s on the brink of signing a new contract with the studio. His adored wife, Marion (Marin Ireland), doesn’t want him to sign; she doesn’t like what Hollywood has done to him, how he’s so much less noble than he was when he was a theater actor back in New York. They’re separated—she may not like Hollywood, but she likes the Malibu beach house to which she has taken their son—and if Charlie re-ups, she’ll leave him for Hank Teagle (C.J. Wilson), a writer returning to New York, locus of all things lofty and non-Angeleno, where he’ll write, if not the Great American Novel, then at least an important one. Complicating matters is the fact that the studio helped Castle cover up a little hit-and-run messiness, and mogul Marcus Hoff (Richard Kind) isn’t about to write off the investment he has made in his star. Ultimately, Charlie, trapped, does the only thing he can to preserve his integrity.

This revival of The Big Knife, directed by Doug Hughes in its first outing on Broadway since Lee Strasberg mounted its debut, is lovingly, gorgeously staged. If Mr. Cannavale seems competent but a bit lost in his role, Ms. Ireland is typically excellent and Mr. Kind breaks from his usual schlemiel shtick to deliver a ferocious performance as a domineering master manipulator. John Lee Beatty’s set is a stone-and-glass vision of California mid-century modern design, and Catherine Zuber’s luxe costumes are worthy of Golden Age Hollywood.

But the play itself is another story. Mr. Odets is a master political dramatist, but this does not rank with his better work. It’s not only obvious but also ham-handed, and the play, obsessed with and surprised by Hollywood’s inherent amorality, today reads as naive. With a businessmen-are-bad message, you can see why Roundabout might consider The Big Knife for this still-recovering economic era. But it’s so dated, and so obviously and laboriously message-laden—Hoff’s smarmy studio henchman is named not just Smiley or Coy but, semaphorically, Smiley Coy—no development exec should have given this revival a green light.

The playwright Douglas Carter Beane is one of the funniest men on Broadway. So is Nathan Lane, maybe the only great musical comedy star working today. But while they have each put on some memorable shows—Mr. Beane’s Little Dog Laughed, Mr. Lane in any number of great musicals—they’ve also both mounted some stinkers. The Nance, a new play by Mr. Beane starring Mr. Lane, about homophobia and 1930s burlesque, lands a lot closer to stinkerdom than hit territory.

Mr. Lane plays Chauncey Miles, a burlesque performer who specializes in comedic, double-entendre-filled roles as an effeminate gay man, what was called a “nance.” This was a common burlesque shtick, but what makes Chauncey unusual is that he is also gay in real life, a longtime tomcat falling into a stable relationship with the hunky young Ned (Jonny Orsini). LaGuardia’s late 1930s clampdown on burlesque arrives, and Chauncey’s life is thrown into turmoil. Long a happily (if ineffectively) closeted bourgeois Republican, he has his I-am-what-I-am moment, decides he can’t tolerate domesticity and, worst of all, sees his burlesque crew uprooted to New Jersey.

The Nance, which opened Monday night at the Lyceum Theatre, is a Lincoln Center Theater production, and Jack O’Brien directs a typically LCT-lush production, with a hulking John Lee Beatty set that rotates from Chauncey’s apartment to the Irving Place Theatre to a cruisy automat and elsewhere. The supporting cast is game and amusing, especially Cady Huffman as a stripper with a heart of gold and Lewis J. Stadlen as an avuncular clownish comic.

Still, there are several insurmountable problems here, most importantly the fact that this is, alas, Serious Stuff. Mr. Beane and Mr. Lane are both gay men, and they seem determined to teach us an important lesson about gay history. Mr. Lane is funny, sure, and Mr. Beane offers some jokes, but neither reaches (because neither seems to want to reach) the hilarity he’s capable of. Also challenging is that Chauncey, proud but self-hating, lonely but alienating, is so hard to feel sympathy for, even when he’s being beat up by cops for not hiding his sexual orientation. It’s a message play, but its message is insufficiently out and proud.

Standing outside the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, waiting to get into the new musical Motown, I couldn’t help bopping my head and tapping my feet—they were piping in the Temptations hit “Get Ready,” and it’s as infectious today as it must have been in 1966. It’s usually a dull moment—standing in the cold, looking for your date, fighting through a crowd—but this soundtrack enlivens it. And that’s how you’ll feel once you make it to your seat, too: Motown, which opened Sunday night, isn’t much of a play, but the soundtrack makes it a blockbuster musical.

How could it not? The Motown catalog comprises some of the great music of the 20th century, and Motown includes nearly 60 classic songs—whatever your favorite Motown number, it’s there (unless, oddly, your favorite is “Tracks of My Tears”). There are a slew of eye-catching performances that may not quite count as acting but are virtuoso feats of impersonation. Valisia LaKae is a sublime Diana Ross, capturing the diva’s mannerisms, smile, stage presence and offstage hauteur. Charl Brown is the spitting image of Smokey Robinson. Raymond Luke Jr., who I saw play young Stevie Wonder and young Michael Jackson, is, like those two, a pint-sized dynamo. (He alternates performances with Jibreel Mawry.) The 18-piece orchestra sounds great. And the choreography, by Patrica Wilcox and Warren Adams, delightfully replicates signature Motown moves.

Where Motown fails is in its attempt to be more than a tribute concert.

Berry Gordy, the visionary impresario who founded Motown, is the book writer for Motown and one of its producers as well. He’s a multitalented man, but neither dramaturgy nor warts-and-all honesty is among his gifts. In its book scenes, Motown reads mostly as anodyne corporate biography, with founder and CEO as hero. Gordy worked hard, looked out for his people, and took gambles to make lasting art. If he had a fault, as the sycophant says to the job interviewer, it was only that he cared too much. The narrative is self-serving, mawkish, and sometimes, as in a tacky dig about Marvin Gaye’s father, ugly.

But the narrative is not what anyone’s here for, and if a good script could have elevated this to good play, a bad one doesn’t stop it from being a fun evening of great music. An hour or so into the show, as Gordy and Ross are falling love to the duet “You’re All I Need to Get By,” you suddenly realize that the entire audience is singing along with the lovers. It’s like a sound effect, almost—a low murmur of backup voices. And with that kind of happy devotion from theatergoers, there ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, to keep Motown from being a hit.

Nor can I imagine any ignoramus parent, or any evil headmistress, able to stand athwart the juggernaut that is Matilda. Based on the Roald Dahl children’s book, with music and lyrics by the Australian dirty-comic-cabaret star Tim Minchin, and starring a rotating cast of four little girls, Matilda triumphed in London last season, where it won more Olivier Awards than any show ever, and arrived last week at the Shubert Theatre as the most anticipated musical of the season. It’s living up to its hype.

Little Matilda (Bailey Ryon at the performance I saw, replaced after an injury near the end by Milly Shapiro) is a genius, reading classic literature before she’s even started school and spinning detailed stories that wow the local librarian. But with overbearing, inattentive, aggressively stupid parents—mom is a competitive ballroom dancer; dad is a hustler passing off used cars as new in an ill-advised deal with a Russian mobster—she gets no support at home. Worse, when she finally starts school, the evil, scheming headmistress, Miss Trunchbull (Bertie Carvel, in drag and deliciously evil) a former Olympic hammer-thrower who believes all kids are maggots, is determined to crush her. The only one who believes in her is her mousy teacher, Miss Honey (Lauren Ward), who is as terrorized by Trunchbull as are the students. But with Honey’s help, and a useful bit of telekinesis, Matilda and the rest of the kids triumph over the malign grown-ups who stand in their way.

Matthew Warchus’s direction is spectacular, a fast-paced, antic dreamscape full of detailed little bits of movement and reaction. The moody sets and garishly loud costumes by Rob Howell are fantastic, and Peter Darling’s choreography, especially for Matilda’s schoolmates, is clever and sublime. Dennis Kelly’s book deftly captures Mr. Dahl’s subversive wordplay. The grown-ups are very funny performers, especially the scene-stealing, child-hating Mr. Carvel and the elastic Gabriel Ebert as Matilda’s dad, a high-stepping, quick-talking collection of elbows and knees. The kids—all of them—are sweet and expertly comic. Ms. Ryon, my first Matilda, was wonderful, with a grown-up gravitas peeking through her innocence that well served her character’s complicated persona. (Ms. Shapiro, who seemed only childlike, impressed me less, but it’s also unfair to harshly judge a pre-tween forced to step in for another actor in a show’s final minutes.)

And, still, as much I found Matilda to be good, even really good, I never quite thought it was great. I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t blown away by it—despite so many excellent elements. And ultimately that’s because of Mr. Michin’s music, which is appropriately atmospheric but only once or twice coalesces into a specific, memorable song. It’s a lovely score, but it frequently serves more as underscoring than as a collection of numbers. And without great numbers, Matilda never quite gave me the emotional exhilaration I was hoping for.

Or maybe I should just take up hammer-throwing.

editorial@observer.com

The Big Knife

Starring Bobby Cannavale, Marin Ireland and Richard Kind

Directed by Doug Hughes

Written by Clifford Odets

Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42nd Street

The Nance

Starring Cady Huffman, Nathan Lane and Jonny Orsini

Directed by Jack O’Brien

Written by Douglas Carter Beane

Lincoln Center Theater at the Lyceum Theatre, 149 West 45th Street

Motown

Starring Charl Brown, Bryan Terrell Clark, Brandon Victor Dixon and Valisia LeKae

Directed by Charles Randolph-Wright

Written by Berry Gordy

Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 West 46th Street

Matilda

Starring Bertie Carvel, Sophia Gennusa, Oona Laurence, Bailey Ryon and Milly Shapiro

Directed by Matthew Warchus

Written by Dennis Kelly

Shubert Theatre, 225 West 44th Street

Benjamin Lytal (Photo by Annie Bourneuf)

Being from the worst state in America (Connecticut), I’ve always struggled to understand the way that a New Yorker is supposed to relate to his or her geographic background. Some people seem to feel embarrassed about their home states the way I do, but others seem to have nice memories. You watch a college basketball game with these sorts of people (they’re often from the Midwest) in a bar and wonder what it must be like not to have to apologize every time someone asks you where you’re from. You also have to wonder if there isn’t a different kind of pride involved, the kind associated with having gotten out.

In his debut novel, A Map of Tulsa, former New Yorker editorial assistant Benjamin Lytal examines the origin question through a love affair. Jim Praley reconnects with Adrienne Booker, an idiosyncratic local heiress he knew from high school, at a Tulsa party after his first year at college, and from there, it’s a summerlong three-way between the couple and their city.

What most recommends this book is its execution. Its first half takes place during the relationship, its second five years later. With such a dynamic, you might assume the tone of the first part to be tender, the second elegiac, but it’s the other way around. The the first part of the novel portrays Jim and Adrienne as aloof toward each other, even though the relationship is clearly significant for both. Jim moves into her penthouse downtown, and joins her in her artist’s studio and at her parties in the Tulsa art scene, such as it is, and she doesn’t always act like she knows he’s there. He tries to get her to clean up by hiding bottles of her favorite whiskey around the apartment, and she agrees to date him after he buys her a gun. “So she’s your adventure,” an older guy tells Jim. “You’ll go back up there and tell the other guys about this crazy girl you hooked up with.”

“Maybe the thing Adrienne and I had really had in common was our selfishness,” Jim writes near the end of the book’s first half. Like Goodbye, Columbus, the novel doesn’t pretend that the relationship is anything other than doomed. Who knows, really, how close they were? How affected it all was?

Only in the second half of the book does the distance begin to close. Jim remembers long walks on drugs, and the time Adrienne made him wander around downtown at night, naked, while she videotaped it as a performance piece. It’s as if he’d been taking it for granted that you knew those stories. He fills in the gaps where he can, though not completely. Sometimes the revelations are made in the negative. “For long periods of time,” Jim writes after he’s moved to New York, “I probably didn’t even think about her.” Probably? Why should he be thinking about her at all, let alone constantly? And why does he seem to feel guilty when he doesn’t?

Call it the Center of the Universe effect. That minor Tulsa landmark appears several times in the book, though only in passing. People walk by it without noting what it is. In real-life Tulsa, it’s a nondescript architectural plaza downtown, a circle where you can hear your words echoed and amplified if you stand in the center. No one outside the circle can hear the effect. Jim sees Tulsa and Adrienne as a Center of the Universe in his biography, and the book is his personal examination of the hold they have over him.

What’s there to say of Tulsa? It’s a place to forget. Jim loses contact with old friends, and doesn’t want to take Adrienne to the Target he used to visit as a child. It’s a place to assert independence. Jim and Adrienne’s first date is at a gay bar near the airport, clearly a worse gay bar than one would find in New York. She seems to be telling him, look, we may fit into this town about as well as a homosexual person does, but like these people, I’m not going to leave. I shouldn’t have to. In the second half of the book, she crashes her motorcycle because she forgot that a friend’s driveway had recently been redone, that there was now a curve. She breaks her back because she trusted the Tulsa in her head. Mr. Lytal, a former book reviewer, doesn’t assume we won’t notice the metaphor, and has Jim analyze this himself. Before Adrienne dies from her injuries, the story of her accident actually “moves” him.

Briefly, he makes plans to relocate to Tulsa. He’s aware of how it will appear to the people in New York, and to the reader: “There goes Jim ... Turning his back on New York. Too good for New York. Pretending that he has some kind of ancestral homeland in the city blocks and front yards of Tulsa.” It’s not that, he insists, and it isn’t. It’s much worse. It’s fetishism. He wants to work for the Booker family, whom he meets at the hospital, even though they are haughty and, wealthy from petroleum, at least a little bit evil.

This dream of Tulsa is not about loyalty. While Adrienne is in her hospital, a much older friend of Jim’s is in another, receiving an “obscure bone treatment.” Wheedled into visiting the townie friend, Jim tells him that in Germany, people are still friends with the people with whom they went to elementary school:

“But in America, it’s like we’re always supposed to disappear—if we reach, you know, a certain level of success. Like Elijah ... All our major social institutions growing up are about building intense friendships over a limited period of time and then severing them. High school, and then college. And summer camp. Poof.”

It’s better to go, and toxic, actually, to stay. But everybody’s from somewhere and everybody falls in love at some point, so how to fix these anxieties? There’s a fatalism to this tightly constructed novel that makes it a page-turner. Recommended for all who have known the tyrannies of relationships and place. 

A Map of Tulsa

Benjamin Lytal

Penguin Books, 272 pp., $15 , March 26

Hubbard.

Lawrence Wright’s new book on Scientology, Going Clear (Knopf, 448 pp., $28.95), was spun out of his 2011 story for The New Yorker about director Paul Haggis’s break with the church. Two magazine fact-checkers worked on the story full-time for four to six months of its yearlong inception, and close to publication they were joined by three more. Their first message to the church, verifying facts about its practices, the life of L. Ron Hubbard and the church’s current leader, David Miscavige, contained 971 questions. Peter Canby, head of the magazine’s fact-checking department, said it was the most “difficult and complicated” story he’s ever worked on in his 19 years at The New Yorker. Second place, he said, went to another piece by Mr. Wright, a profile of Ayman al-Zawahiri that came out in 2002, “when we probably knew more about al-Zawahiri than the CIA did.”

As recounted in the Haggis piece, in September 2010 the church sent two flacks and four lawyers to the New Yorker offices at 4 Times Square in a grand effort to respond to those questions and to see if they couldn’t dissuade the editors from publishing the piece.

The meeting lasted about eight hours. The Scientology team, outfitted in sharp suits, frequently giggled as Mr. Wright defended his sources. The church representatives presented charts that detailed everything they perceived to be wrong with the story, based on what they knew about it from the fact-checking questions. Tommy Davis, the church’s lead spokesman at the time, would often interrupt Mr. Wright’s references to the church leader, saying, “you mean Mr. Miscavige, Larry, Mr. Miscavige.”

“He had a pie chart of the 971 questions we’d sent him,” Mr. Wright said, recalling the meeting during a recent interview at the Random House offices. “The pie chart showed that 59 percent of them were false.” He let that sink in. “They’re questions! How do they fall into the true-false category? It was bizarre to me.”

It wasn’t a complete wash. The Scientology team brought along 48 binders in bankers boxes, which they left with the journalists, claiming the material within would refute all their false questions. Lined up in a row, they were seven feet long. During a bathroom break shortly after the binders were revealed, New Yorker editor David Remnick pulled Mr. Wright aside. “You know what you got here, you schmuck?” Mr. Remnick said. “You’ve got a book!”

The meeting at the New Yorker offices would come to represent the church’s whole attitude in dealing with Mr. Wright’s fact-checking questions—the pull its representatives seemed to feel between knowing what was going to be in a story and their inability to respond to it fully.

Scientology represents a unique test of the fact-checking system, if investigative fact-checking can be seen as a mixture of research and, in Mr. Canby’s words, “controlled explosions” that allow the subject to respond, or freak out, before publication. The questions that arose over the course of writing this book, like those concerning physical abuse, often did merit some kind of a response, and the publishers’ incentive to keep the church’s “explosions” controlled was strong, given Scientology’s penchant for lawsuits. These high stakes, though, invariably run up against a lack of access—given Scientology’s secrecy and strict PR policy, you might have a better chance of getting quotes from the Taliban. Fact-checking becomes the battlefield upon which the piece is hashed out.

Mr. Wright’s main contact for the book was Karin Pouw, who had replaced Tommy Davis as head press officer for the church in the time since Mr. Wright had written the New Yorker story. Initially she told Mr. Wright and his assistant handling the fact-checking for the book, Lauren Wolf, that it would take seven days to respond to each fact-checking question, a rate of just 52 a year. Ms. Wolf eventually sent 160 questions, in a dozen or so emails, doing her best to work with Ms. Pouw’s schedule, but the lag time between query and response only increased over the course of the book’s writing. Ms. Wolf often wouldn’t hear back for weeks at a time.

In an email to The Observer, Ms. Pouw wrote that the church had been forthcoming with Mr. Wright and that her team “answered all of his questions,” for the book, though Mr. Wright said he found her far less helpful than Mr. Davis, who seemed to offer more actual responses to fact-checking questions. “Some of them were outright lies and fabrications, in my opinion,” Mr. Wright said, “but still, they were responses.”

Early on, Ms. Pouw’s staff put forth a general policy of not addressing questions unless they knew the sources for them, which Mr. Wright couldn’t provide on principle (and also because the church has a record of allegedly harassing those who speak out against it). According to Ms. Pouw, Mr. Wright once wrote her an email that said, “It seems that the only thing you’re really interested in is getting a list of my sources. You can have that as soon as the book is published, not before.”

Consequently, Mr. Wright said, the responses they did receive were often confusing, or not substantive.

“For instance,” he said at Random House, “we asked about some moveable text in L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. We were trying to figure out which was the authoritative version, because in this edition it says this, but in this edition it doesn’t say that. Or in this edition it’s here rather than here.” He turned to Ms. Wolf, who sat in on the interview. “What was the response to that one?”

Ms. Wolf glanced at the ceiling. “They asked us if we were accusing them of messing with L. Ron Hubbard’s work, basically,” she said.

“Which they were!” Mr. Wright said. “But we just wanted—there was no hostile intent, we just wanted to footnote something and asked how we should do that.”

“Literally,” Ms. Wolf said, “‘What page number should we use?’”

They’d also quibble over semantics. Ms. Wolf soon learned not to include any clauses in her questions, to keep things as clear as possible. At the New Yorker meeting, Mr. Davis had found fault with Mr. Wright’s referring to something that had happened “recently,” when in fact it had happened two weeks prior.

The church responded more helpfully to questions about L. Ron Hubbard than it did about David Miscavige, Mr. Wright said. The section concerning the modern church has asterisks every 20 pages or so with a statement at the bottom of the page asserting that whatever is being described never happened. For the first half, about Hubbard’s life, the church seems to have been much more cooperative, and even confirmed some elements of the church that may seem unsavory to those outside it, like “overboarding,” a religious practice that is exactly what it sounds like—Hubbard came up with the idea in order to punish people during a period when the church’s top members lived at sea.

Mr. Wright worked with whatever he received from the church’s press officers. The cache of binders wasn’t packed with guarded Scientology secrets, but it was still useful to him as a resource about the life of L. Ron Hubbard, the topic on which he expanded his article most significantly for the book. “It led me in other directions,” Mr. Wright said, “because I got into the church’s thinking.”

One essential document came out of that meeting at 4 Times Square, a “Notice of Separation from the U.S. Naval Service” for Hubbard, provided by the church, that offers an impressive war record. Mr. Wright managed to find another copy of this document through his own research, one that shows a less storied Naval career. His attitude throughout the writing seemed to be that every opening the church representatives offered was an opportunity.

Even the church’s evasiveness was helpful in its own way. Mr. Wright said he asked questions relating to alleged physical abuse by Mr. Miscavige. “I think it’s very telling, when you ask direct questions like that” and there’s no response, Mr. Wright said, adding that “at the very least, they could have denied them.”

Many of their responses instead included a deluge of information about new churches that have opened around the world, similar to the advertorial that recently ran on The Atlantic’s website.

“It’s always the same,” said Tony Ortega, the former editor of The Village Voice, who has been reporting on the church since 1995 and is at work on his own book about Scientology. “That’s why I don’t really worry about it too much. I see reporters all the time dutifully ask them for a comment, as they should, and the church always puts out the same exact comment over and over and over. You can write it yourself. One: everyone’s lying about us. Two: no one’s reporting about our fantastic expansion. That’s it. That’s all they ever say to anybody.”

Before publication, anyway. Ms. Pouw, in an e-mail to The Observer, called Mr. Wright’s fact-checking “shabby,” and gave a long list of denials. She called one of his sources, used for a single anecdote in the book, “a self-admitted inveterate liar,” and picked away at some of the book’s details, e.g.:

Mr. Wright claims that the Church of Scientology owns a bank and schools in Clearwater, Florida. We don’t and never have. Checking public records or a simple call to bank regulators would have confirmed that we don’t own a bank, nor are we the landlord to any bank nor do we own any parcels of land on which a bank sits. We purchased an empty building in Florida that prior to 1975 housed a bank, but it hasn’t been a bank in 37 years and never housed bank during the entire time we have owned it.

(In the book, it’s actually only referred to as a “bank building.”)

Mr. Ortega said he’s seen the church’s tactics for dealing with the media change over the years. In the ’90s, he said, it seemed to want to court editors and writers as a way of trying to win positive press. He even once had lunch with Ms. Pouw at the church’s Celebrity Centre in Hollywood. Then in the 2000s, he said, it shifted to a model in which it refuted everything said about it, a period Mr. Ortega says he most associates with Mr. Davis. When asked about whether the church closes off its members from their more skeptical relatives, Mr. Davis told CNN anchor John Roberts in 2008 that the church had no policy of “disconnection.” This was seen as a bold claim, since many family members who have been labeled heretics by the church can testify that they’re no longer allowed to speak with adherent kin. The reporter Joe Childs, who with his colleague Thomas C. Tobin produced the landmark Truth Rundown series in The St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) about allegations of abuse by Mr. Miscavige, told The Observer that he had a good working relationship with Mr. Davis, though Mr. Davis’s response to that series was to round up a number of Scientologists who swore up and down that it was all false.

Mr. Ortega said that, like Mr. Wright, he doesn’t hear much from the church these days. His last contact with Ms. Pouw was over a widely distributed anti-Scientology e-mail sent by Debbie Cook, a former Scientology executive, on New Year's Eve 2011. Mr. Childs said he still receives comments from Ms. Pouw, though the nature of their relationship is different because his paper is local.

It’s not as though the church disregards its media profile. The spokesperson job has been a historically difficult role. One of the church’s first major whistle-blowers was Robert Vaughn Young, who worked as the church spokesman under Hubbard. There’s a YouTube video in which Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, two former spokesmen for the church, describe sitting in on speakerphone interviews in which Mr. Miscavige was in the room but refused to speak to the reporters, instead writing his responses on a legal pad that they had to read verbatim. Both have now left the church. Mr. Davis has at least relinquished his position as spokesman, if he hasn't left the church entirely.

Fact-checking in particular seems to have become a fixation for the church. After the New Yorker story ran, an issue of the Scientologist magazine Freedom ran an issue dedicated to smearing Mr. Haggis, and the article. A copy arrived, via courier, at Mr. Wright’s house in Austin, Texas. Clipped to the front page was a type-written note that presented to Mr. Wright “your personal FACT-CHECKED copy.”

dduray@observer.com

Update, Jan. 29: An earlier version of this post misstated the resignation date of Debbie Cook. We've also clarified Mr. Davis's current status with the church

Waldo's work.

Patrick Waldo, 27, moved to the city in 2006, and—like so many before him—worked jobs in media and relegated his creative expression to the nocturnal hours. Such expression had two outlets. The first consisted of improv classes and performances at the UCB Theatre, the city’s proving ground for up-and-coming comedians. The second involved writing the word “moustache” in cursive, with markers, on the upper lips of models in hundreds upon hundreds of subway advertisements.

There’s a great moment in Mr. Waldo’s one-man show Moustache Man: Confessions of a NYC Graffiti Artist in which he uses a slideshow to reacquaint the audience with his work. He was arrested about a year ago—his gag order with the district attorney’s office just expired—so the reminders are useful. Big moustaches, small moustaches. Moustaches on models. Moustaches on the bridesmaids from Bridesmaids. Moustaches on Madea. You’ve seen these.  Moustaches on Kevin James. Moustaches on Andy Cohen, photographed and tweeted out by Lance Bass with commentary: “@ my stop lol!” Moustaches on every prominent New Yorker (Batali, etc.), dressed like Jets in ads for football season. Mr. Waldo is gangly, and it’s not hard to imagine him jumping around, whooping like Daffy Duck, the archetypical moustacher, after he’d finished a station.

“I moved up here for UCB, really,” Mr. Waldo, who is originally from Virginia, told The Observer recently at a bar on the Lower East Side. The troupe’s Comedy Central television show was, to him, a revelation. He taped it every Wednesday and watched it with a friend after school on Thursdays. In 2005, he came up and saw Louis C.K. at UCB. “He was just starting to talk shit about his daughters, how they’re the worst roommates ever,” he remembers. “And I cried. It was the first time I laughed so hard that I was crying. It was probably one of the best stand-up sets I’ve ever seen.”

The initial idea was to order actual fake mustaches to slap on the ads, but people ripped those off and the blank spaces left behind depressed him. “I actually hate the ‘mustache meme,’” Mr. Waldo confided. “People who have, like, a mustache tattoo on their finger or their coffee mug. It’s dumb.” And yet he liked the way the word looked. It wasn’t long before it became an obsession. He didn’t have an unlimited MetroCard, so he tried to do every ad in a station (West Fourth was a favorite because he could do A/C/E and B/D/F/M uptown and downtown with one swipe), and even if the tag itself only took about six seconds to do (he timed himself), a whole station could take 20 to 30 minutes.

“I would go on Flickr and search for the tag ‘moustache,’” he said. “I’d see new posters that I’d done and know that people were getting the joke and that they were liking it.” He liked that people got it. It was a much bigger audience than the ones that came out to see his improv.

The cops seemed to get it, too. The piece that spurred the investigation that brought Mr. Waldo down was an Ann Taylor ad outside the Transit Police station at 42nd Street, and they took it personally.

He started getting off at stops en route to parties, not waiting to reach his destination. He was late to gigs. His girlfriend stopped waiting for him as he finished up yet another stop on their way home.

When the Transit Police finally arrested him, in an unnecessarily elaborate sting operation as Mr. Waldo was getting off his job as a double-decker bus tour guide, there was no denying it. (When they cuffed him, the cops said, “Looks like we finally found Waldo!” Mr. Waldo was mainly offended on a comedic level.) They had security footage, and he was too good at what he did. The imitations didn’t properly straddle the philtrum, didn’t nail the swirls on both ends. He ended up with 30 days community service.

Now he’s got the one-man show, which he will perform twice this month, and he is getting ready for an exhibition at Krause Gallery in January. The main thing is to stay true to the brand, although he’s still not sure what he’s going to do.

“Jim Joe is one my favorites,” Mr. Waldo said when asked about other graffiti artists who work the subways. “Jim Joe is pretty much a tagger—he just writes his name, or phrases like ‘keep walking.’ I like that. ‘Keeeep walking.’”

But when he went to Jim Joe’s recent show at The Hole, Mr. Waldo was disappointed.

“I was ready to drop some serious cash on a Jim Joe piece, but it was all like Abstract Expressionist, minimalist, conceptual bullshit,” he said. “Completely different from anything you knew him for, and it was disappointing. I didn’t buy anything. I would have taken a canvas that had ‘Jim Joe’ or some dumb tag on it. I would have taken that in a heartbeat. I love New York and I love the New York scene and, for me, owning a piece of street art is like owning a piece of New York history.”

Mr. Diaz. (Photo by Nina Subin)

At first, you weren’t sure how to feel about Junot Díaz’s latest book of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead, 224 pp., $26.95). You think this might have had something to do with his use of the second person.

When you set the book down, your first instinct was to say it’s very different from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but the more you thought about it, the more you realized that there are quite a few similarities. There are the multiple vignettes feeding into the same essential story line, the nerd patois that peppers the text with references to geek pop culture, the second person and, obviously, the heartbreak. So why doesn’t it feel similar?

You think it might be the scope. This book is about Yunior, Mr. Díaz’s fictional alter ego, who in Lose Her watches his brother Rafa die from cancer, sleeps around, remembers the first time he ever saw snow. He works on a science fiction book set in the 1980s. You have to be honest: you were never that enthusiastic about Yunior. You always found him to be a bit of a cipher—assuming he’s the same Yunior from Oscar Wao and Mr. Díaz’s first book of stories, Drown (and you have no reason to think otherwise, since they’d all still be ciphers, even if they were separate characters). Only one story isn’t about him, the one about a hardworking laundrywoman who does her best not to think about her lover’s family back in Santo Domingo as she and the lover look at houses together in New Jersey. When you got to that one, you couldn’t help but remember how big Wao was. Wao was about the Dominican Republic, the whole country and everyone in it. Like Lose Her, it jumped around in time, but the arc and the large and varied cast of narrators led to a feeling of epic scale. When he compared Rafael Trujillo to Sauron, or Galactus from the Fantastic Four, you believed it.

Staying with Yunior’s voice, and only Yunior’s voice, can feel a bit claustrophobic, but at least that nerd-speak is back. A dry spell in his sex life isn’t just a dry spell, it’s “fucking Arrakeen.” You’ve always liked this, not only because it engages you—the you who read Grant Morrison’s writing stint on JLA in the individual issues—but also because it signals that he is reporting from a very personal place. Look, he was saying about Trujillo, that guy was so bad that nobody will ever be able to understand his reign objectively, so why bother? Have some extreme subjectivity, and humor. You think that’s part of the joke in using the second person, too, because it’s obviously not “you” you. One story in this new book even begins “you, Yunior.” But the rambling personal style is a lens best focused on something big. His short story in The New Yorker’s recent sci-fi issue, which is apparently part of a science fiction novel he’s been trying to finish, could have been subtitled, “Stuck in the ‘Friend Zone’ at the End of the World.” You thought it was hectic, funny, tragic and brilliant.

Here’s how Mr. Díaz’s style has changed for this book, and your opinion of how effectively it was used: it’s too sparse, and he chose the wrong topic. Drown was written in a style that was a little too straightforward, pretty much just “this happened” then “this happened,” albeit in tight stories, but he developed that tone further in the laid-back Wao. It rambled, in a good way. Here, it’s much the same, but pared-down in the Raymond Carver/Ernest Hemingway mode of stoic tragedy. One story ends: “We never spoke again. A couple of years later I went away to college and I don’t know where the fuck she went.” In the final story, Yunior admits he cheated on his fiancée with 50 women, and that’s just the starting point. The rest of the story ticks off the years after their breakup like the days after the apocalypse.

The stiff upper lip means a shortage of sex scenes. Mr. Díaz has described his style as a mix of “English, Spanish and nerdish,” and if he ever wanted to add a fourth inflection, you’d nominate “pornish.” What’s there, sex-wise, is perfunctory—it was good, it was bad, we held each other. Here’s about as dirty as it gets, in a scene with Ms. Lora, a high school teacher with whom Yunior had a liaison when he was 16 (line breaks included): “Do you have a condom?/ You are a worrier like that./ Nope, she says and you try to keep control but you come in her anyway./ I’m really sorry, you say.” See how it’s about him, but not at all about sex? This fits with the general sparseness, and yet you wonder if he might not have benefited from a few more dirty details. You mean, 50 women! There had to be some stories there. He has a big topic for his prose lens—this weird, hulking infidelity—but you never really understand it, because he doesn’t try to explain it.

Maybe this sexlessness is why Yunior still feels like a cipher, despite being the main character.  If you think about a potential relationship longingly—and there’s a lot of longing here—it’s because there’s this shadow of what might be stretching long before it, all those positions to explore, or left to explore, if you’re longing for someone you’ve lost. That the sex is shallow, when it does happen, means the emotions lack a punch. It’s like a horror movie in which the murders aren’t very gory: it’s harder to be scared for the dopes onscreen.

This is also your way of saying that the women are forgettable. You never even get a chance to like them, because most of the stories, true to the title, are about the end. You’re not sure that Yunior deserves to be happy, even though the book sets you up to root for him.

You wonder if Junot Díaz, whose friends call him Yunior, might have been too close to the subject. You keep returning to this interview he did with New York magazine to promote the book, in which you found out that he a) recently suffered a bad breakup and b) has been under contract to do a book about “the rise and fall of a young cheater” since the success of Drown 16 years ago, when he was 27. To you, this sounded like someone narcing on himself, like he’s on that Substance D stuff from A Scanner Darkly. “Writing short stories in a culture like ours is like giving birth to girls in a Dominican conservative family in the fifties,” he told New York, hastening to add that he loves girl babies. Did he want you to read this book at all?

You liked some of the stories. The one with the female narrator embraces the anxious idea that citizenship is a zero-sum game, and the one in which Yunior goes on vacation with a girlfriend as he tries to ignore their collapsing relationship will ring true to anyone who’s been in that situation. But from reading Oscar Wao, you know that Mr. Díaz is capable of much more, and if this book was required writing, it definitely isn’t required reading. It’s just ... fine, and you say that as someone who is pretty close to Mr. Díaz’s ideal reader.

Even so, your opinion of Mr. Díaz hasn’t changed one iota. These stories feel like the B-sides off a really great record, which makes you all the more hungry for that sci-fi apocalypse book. You’d preorder that one FTL.

dduray@observer.com

So what to make of Johnson’s latest book, Soul of a Whore and Purvis: Two Plays in Verse (FSG, 240 pp., $20)? The fact that anyone would write in iambic pentameter these days is pretty odd, but it’s an especially strange feat for Denis Johnson, whose characters tend to be outcasts and losers, the last kind of people to be associated with stylized language, at least in this century. It’s as if William Faulkner decided to knock out a novel in the style of P.G. Wodehouse. The weirdness of the style is inescapable, but besides demonstrating that Mr. Johnson is capable of writing in any format—having already proven himself adept at the poem, short story, novella, prose play, post-Graham Greene spy novel, detective novel parody and reported magazine piece—the iambic pentameter is very much a part of what makes these plays great.

Its first benefit for the plays is superficial—both are structured like countdowns, causing the pace of the lines to feel like a metronome or a heartbeat. Soul of a Whore concerns a sham preacher, Bill Jenks, who upon his release from prison discovers he actually does have the power to banish demons from the bodies they inhabit; he’s prophesied to raise the dead, which we naturally assume will happen before the play is over. Purvis tells the story of Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent credited with nabbing John Dillinger, and is told in reverse chronology, beginning with a scene where Lyndon Johnson, in his underwear, plays gin rummy with J. Edgar Hoover, Purvis not on stage and long dead. Both the plays are a little out there, topic-wise, but the verse creates a suspension of disbelief for plots that would otherwise seem ridiculous. People say “O” where they mean “Oh,” and brush away a criminal’s promise as “a villain’s oath,” which means that, as with Shakespeare, there will be spirits, and there will be larger-than-life historical figures, and you will not question it.

Mr. Johnson is a skilled mythmaker—the colonel in his Vietnam epic Tree of Smoke at times outshines Brando’s Kurtz—and the format leaves him free to create giants. Purvis is a jut-jawed G-man whose quest for decency is a joke, and Dillinger is a true American Christ—all swagger, ambition and endowment. This all works out especially well for Hoover, who’s already seen stellar treatment in fiction—Don DeLillo’s Underworld and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid come to mind—but might be better suited to iambic pentameter than any other figure in American history. “Our enemies are ideologies,” he tells Clyde Tolson, while wearing a kimono. “And we must smash the vessels that purvey them.” “Don’t you see that we shall minister for gods/that we create?” he says, explaining the 20^th century to Purvis. Later in that scene he dances to what the script calls “sexual, melting jazz.”

And will you believe me when I tell you there is kindness in their hearts? Baby Face Nelson brings Dillinger a poignant flower at one point and, all shot up by the side of the road, Pretty Boy Floyd soliloquizes as Purvis and a cop stand by, remembering his blind uncle eating ice cream: “I watched him like a blind boy who could see/the word for doing things that way is ‘young.’/The word for that is ‘young, when you were nine.’/It makes me kind of glad that I remember/It makes me wish you wouldn’t kill me boys.”

Mr. Johnson can write tight, and he can write loose, but here the sentences are coiled springs, yet another benefit to the format, which allows him to bring all his poetic talents to the fore. “Leave me to the world of things and men,” hisses a demon in Soul of a Whore. You’d almost hate to see these plays performed because there’s too much to take in on any given line. Here’s a grisly scene painted in just a few sentences, when the preacher Jenks berates a man who says he had to kill two people because a hold-up went bad in Ellersberg. “It’s Ellersberg, a crossroads with a store,” Jenks says, not buying it. “A gasoline pump, and a Coke machine./It’s like a scene from 1957./ Thing still dispenses Yoo-Hoo for a dime.”

Soul of a Whore examines the spaces shared by demon and savior, flock and preacher, preacher and whore (Jenks: “Announcement!—I have never read the Bible”), executioner and executed, Jesus and the wretched. This is mostly tied up in the plot, whose broad outlines might be guessed from some of those dichotomies. There are some diversions and perhaps too many characters, though despite its supernatural elements the play is less experimental than Purvis, which makes the verse stand out that much more. We’re dealing with normal people, with Southern accents no less, who seem to rebel against the linguistic order imposed on them by slipping out of their roles and labels or, to the same effect, showing blind dedication to them. An executioner executes someone during a hostage situation that threatens to kill them all anyway, and a character named H.T., as in “hostage taker,” just can’t help taking hostages, even in places like Ellersberg. Birds gotta fly.

The linguistic rebellion is not only outside the dialogue. Jenks is both shaman and showman, in person and in conversation, thanks to the accents. “Huntsville was named after Huntsville,” a character explains at one point, meaning the Texas one, then the Alabama one. One character is called Masha, when in fact her name is “Marsha” (at first Jenks thinks she’s Russian, though she insists she’s from Texas: “Where’d you get the Masha from? Odessa?”). Someone is described as committing “vehicular infanticide” and Jenks shudders at the words: “Sometimes can’t you feel the English tongue/Kind of licking around inside your stomach?” You can fault Soul of a Whore for some bizarre tonal shifts, including a few pretty good but ill-timed jokes set in an execution chamber, but you can’t fault the coherence of its overall vision, and the sense that what we’re viewing is the gritty life of Mr. Johnson’s novels siphoned through some antiquated medium. At one point, out of nowhere, a radio turns on and a voice says, “Insects are often the only witnesses/to a crime.” That would be the characters, and us, in our inability to process the penumbras of existence.

These plays, in their archaic and formal structure, allow Mr. Johnson to directly address his skepticism about the supposed power of language, something that seems to run through his other works in more subtle ways. There’s his general terseness, which he has in common with his Iowa drinking buddy, Raymond Carver, though if Carver’s sparsity is symptomatic of nihilism (see “Tell the Women We’re Going”), Mr. Johnson’s seems to imply that there’s something more beneath the surface.

You can see it in little things, like the way Wayne, the tragic figure in the story “Work,” is never described physically. “What can be said about those fields?” the narrator asks in “Dundun.” All he sees are cows, “smelling one another’s butts,” seemingly oblivious, for the moment, to the man dying in his car. His presentation of an English language unworthy of us can be conceptual at times. There’s the idea of the a CIA agent’s brain distilled uselessly onto note cards in Tree of Smoke, and then his confounding plan to plant false intel (which is nothing but words) revealed by someone who finds a bafflingly complex manifesto that raises more questions than it answers. “There’s really only one question,” says the bumbling detective Lenny English in Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. “Did God really kill himself?” Well, yes, but it sounds stupid if you put it that way.

dduray@observer.com

The point being that the attraction of Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH (FSG, 336 pages, $26.00) is inbuilt. The story concerns the daring assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, an architect of the Holocaust and the so-called “hangman of Prague,” who became the governor of what used to be Czechoslovakia after the Nazis took over. Heydrich was assassinated in 1942 by a two-man team—a Czech and a Slovak, both trained to kill by the British and dropped behind enemy lines, Inglourious Basterds-style. After stopping his Mercedes on a street in Prague, they engaged in a shootout and blew him up with a bomb. It’s a novel-ready story, maybe even summer blockbuster-ready, from the diabolical villain to the selfless heroes out of Joseph Campbell 101. The story even comes with real-life irony and symbolism, and so to evaluate Mr. Binet’s novel is to assess its telling.

HHhH is beyond question entertaining and good (it won the Prix Goncourt’s first novel award in France in 2010), but it’s also unorthodox in a way that, arguably, hinders its success. Mr. Binet calls the book an “infranovel,” and about a quarter of its short chapters are present-day ruminations on the writing of the book you now hold in your hands, how to best tell the tale in the most accurate way possible. The effect is a “personal story”—and Mr. Binet stresses this, perhaps anticipating criticism that he doesn’t mention the Holocaust much—of both the plot to kill Heydrich and his own obsession with it.

Given that HHhH is so firmly grounded in fact, a busy person might want to know the extent to which it improves upon the Wikipedia entry for Operation Anthropoid, which it does considerably. It takes us to the places that demonstrate our protagonist’s wickedness and our antagonists’ heroism. Yes, Heydrich is the star, the “Blonde Beast” who plays the violin, flies a fighter plane like it’s a noble steed, and may have been into S&M. We see him during Night of the Long Knives as he dispatches orders from the headquarters of the SS. Put a gun in his hand, he orders his thugs, tell them he’s committed suicide. You caught another playing tennis and he ran into the woods? Chase him down! (A corollary to the theory that it’s excellent to watch people killing Nazis: it’s also terrific to watch Nazis kill other Nazis. Philip K. Dick’s fake Axis politics in The Man in the High Castle were, somehow, a blast). These scenes of our main character’s crimes both attract and repel like those moments on The Sopranos when Tony reminded you that he may be a little too efficiently cruel to be called human. Heydrich, gun cocked, watches a man bleed to death in a prison rather than put him out of his misery. And it all happened! You almost can’t believe it.

You’re allowed to be melodramatic when you’re grounded in fact, and this also works out well for our hagiographied heroes, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, who meet their end fighting waves of Nazis in the basement of a tiny Prague church. One of the novel’s more stirring passages involves their departure from England. Gabčík hesitates next to the plane that will drop him outside Prague and Colonel Moravec, who’s trained the boys, is sure that he’s having second thoughts about trying to kill the most dangerous man in the Reich. Instead, Gabčík tells him, he forgot to pay a tab at the local restaurant. Would the colonel mind paying it for him? There’s so much in this moment—the stoic unwavering, the fundamental goodness of someone who doesn’t want to rob a restaurant of 10 pounds, and of course, the suicidal nature of his mission. You can’t help pumping a fist at that. It almost doesn’t matter if this actually happened, though it did, as we’re informed by a reference to Moravec’s memoirs, a reference weaved into the anecdote so subtly that it doesn’t disrupt what John Gardner called the fictive dream.

Factual clarification is the role of most of the author’s meditations on his own book, though this goes hand in hand with the process of invention, which he also describes. They’re mostly isolated chapters, but are sometimes interspersed in the scenes they reflect on. We’re with Mr. Binet as he works out where he should put a character as he surreptitiously enters a country by train. He could sit anywhere. Where would it be best to put him? By the door, that makes sense. He’d want to see everyone who enters the car. We feel the paranoia of the moment reflected in the chapter’s creation, and it feels appropriate. Though Mr. Binet is the author, wasn’t that character, in a way, the author of this scene? And weren’t the Brits authors when they decided, for symbolic purposes, that they wanted a Czech and a Slovak for the job? Weren’t the French when they embargoed the Reich and deprived Heydrich of the penicillin that might have saved him? Mr. Binet views himself as just a steward of history and will go out of his way to name names, just to have them on the record, even if he doesn’t have time to create proper characters from every hero in the resistance. He’ll analyze other works of World War II fiction (apparently his French publisher had to excise 20 pages of his bashing the competition, The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell) or mention how he just visited a setting from the previous chapter with his beautiful girlfriend. Their effectiveness varies—you probably would have noticed on your own that there are many two-men pairings in this book, just as there are a lot of initials (SA, SD, SS, HH—the title refers to a phrase said to be circulating Germany at the time, “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”), and it’s unclear what any of that really means since it’s just ... true.

Whether or not you like Mr. Binet’s asides is a matter of taste, though you’d better like them if you choose to finish the book because they continue through to the end, not stopping even for the climax. After a few pages of psyching himself up for the actual assassination, albeit a little doubtfully (“How can I convey even the tiniest idea of what those three men lived through?”), Heydrich’s Mercedes finally leaves the castle where he has installed himself as protector and then everything stops so that Mr. Binet can tell us about a relevant and little-known book he’s been reading by George Sand. Then we’re back to the men waiting for Heydrich’s car, and some enjoyable tension, soon broken (“He’s not coming.” New paragraph. “But obviously I wouldn’t have written this whole book if Heydrich wasn’t coming.”) and we jump into the second person to find ourselves in Heydrich’s pompous brain. Then Gabčík tries to fire. His gun jams (“I can’t resist cheap literary effects,” writes our author and then adds, a little later, that this really did happen though), then nobody moves (“It’s like a Western!”) and there’s a chapter-long aside about how the author has just begun reading William Vollmann’s Europe Central. At this point, the bomb has yet to go off.

A variety of things might affect your opinion of these asides, the degree to which you like to learn from your novels being one of them, but it is possible to do justice to the heroes of World War II and the victims of the Holocaust without a rigorous grounding in fact, and Europe Central actually does just that. Like HHhH, that novel is a series of well researched vignettes but, by contrast, it’s one that doesn’t hesitate to invent details—like a love triangle between Dmitri Shostakovich, the director Roman Karmen and his wife—in the service of recreating the dark universe that Russia and Germany occupied during the war. Mr. Vollmann’s an expressionist. His narrators are intelligence agents, his footnotes in the back and his creations vivid. You will understand how a captured Russian general comes to think that a Nazi-funded anti-Bolshevik army might be a good idea, not realizing that he’s a collaborator. You’ll come to view an SS man who works at concentration camps throughout the war as a hero—he is, in fact, anti-Nazi, and joined up to throw off the occasional Zyclon B shipment. If that doesn’t sound like heroism to you, well, that’s the point of the book. You have to read it to understand how degraded heroism was at the time. It was enough to make the killing rooms slightly less efficient—he couldn’t have done anything more.

It might be that Mr. Binet’s assassination target is too high-profile for this kind of treatment, but you can’t say that he had to write it the way he did. Mr. Binet chooses to end the story on a seriously cheesy note, a jump back in time to an envisioned meeting between the two men as they flee what used to be their country. Also on the boat are women and children, the kind who will be slaughtered by the Nazis in retribution for the death of Heydrich, and then, out of nowhere, there’s Natacha, that beautiful girlfriend, who has really only popped up in a few places in the text to comment on what a funny book it is that her boyfriend is writing. Mr. Binet puts himself on the boat too, hoping he’s done the two men justice. The ending might strike you differently but for me it underscored the arrogance that Mr. Binet’s “I’m so unworthy of history” act belies. He seems to think that his words matter, that they can somehow make him nearly equivalent to the good men who murdered the genocidal maniac, and that if he doesn’t tell the story properly his big powerful words will hurt history. This is laughable. History is strong. History is vast. World War II and its victims are never going to care about what some French guy thinks, no matter how attractive his girlfriend is.

Mr. Binet can rest easily on the boat, if he likes. His main job was to paint a picture of good and evil in big bold colors and for the most part he’s done this. But they might have been bolder.

dduray@observer.com

Correction 5/16: An earlier version of this review misstated the nationality of the narrator's girlfriend.