PUTTING OUT THE PAPER

An ailing New York City tabloid struggles to survive amid tumultuous labor negotiations and the threat of scandal in this blend of comedy and drama.

When Fred Rogan becomes the new publisher of the New York Globe, he inherits a slew of problems. The paper is financially floundering, and it seems impossible to turn around without a massive investment in its aging printing and delivery systems. Unfortunately, Harold “Spike” Baker, the president of Telluride, the paper’s parent company, has no intention of making such an investment unless the tabloid can prove itself far more profitable—a Catch-22 that bedevils Rogan. But he’s given another path to success by Baker: significantly lower labor costs and “break the back of these goddamned unions,” and an investment commitment could be forthcoming. But while Rogan interprets this as an imprimatur to collaboratively partner with the unions, Baker wants war and hires Ida Farrow, a lawyer known for battling unions. And she doesn’t seem to see the prospect of war as a metaphor either—she brings in a team of “Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and some ex-Marines” both to intimidate the union workers and prepare for violence. Meanwhile, a peculiar man named James Turner squats outside the paper’s main printing plant in Brooklyn in a makeshift shack, blocking the construction of a new parking lot. He claims he’s defending the property rights of the Lenape and refuses to compromise. Gwenn Parkinson, a new reporter for the Globe infamous for her aggressively sensationalistic celebrity reporting, investigates Turner’s plight and uncovers the possibility that he has been egregiously wronged by the paper. This plotline manages to be as comically clever as it is poignantly affecting, an artful balancing act that characterizes Talbot’s deft storytelling.

The author paints a captivating tableau of New York in the 1980s, paradoxically as glamorous as it is mercurially violent. In addition, he furnishes an edifying portrait of the newspaper industry—his knowledge of it is astonishing—though he has a tendency to inter readers under a mountain of technical details. Farrow, in particular, turns out to be a captivating character, a woman not only of considerable lawyerly talent, but also bottomless aggression. She announces herself fearlessly to her union adversaries: “Now whatever you’ve heard about me, there’s only one thing that’s important. It took momma ten months to have Ida Farrow. Before I slid down from her womb I needed to know what bedroom I got and what school I’d go to. I was born negotiating, gentlemen.” The central strength of Talbot’s writing is a strange ambiguity—the audience will not be sure, even after reading the entire novel, if this is a comedy or a tragedy. The sheer weirdness of Turner’s quixotic challenge to the Globe is often hilariously silly, but the reasons for it, only incrementally shared by the author, are heartbreakingly sad. It takes painstaking sensitivity to allow these two incongruous strains to coexist in the same literary cosmos, something Talbot certainly achieves.

A thrilling newspaper tale, as funny as it is darkly dramatic.