Is Thomas Chatterton Williams’s new book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, about wokeness, or is it the story of 2020? Yes. Is it a memoir, or is it advancing and building an argument? It’s both. Is it a treatise against “anti-racism,” or a general rebuttal of mad, illiberal ideas? A bit of each. It’s a lot of things and not enough of one.
In his most famous book, A Self-Portrait in Black & White: Unlearning Race, Williams used the memoir format to air a core argument. Namely, of the incoherence of race as a contemporary identity, and in favor of color blindness. That’s a more ambitious argument, yet that book worked so well; it was so persuasive and moving because his argument and personal story were so tightly bound together. His life made his case for him, and thus his anecdotes were not a distraction from the argument any more than the argument was imposed upon his story. It was a brilliant memoir and the best brief ever for color blindness. With Summer of Our Discontent, however, he’s making a less novel version of that argument and forcing the story to support it. In fact, his interjections of memoir, such as flying from the United States to Paris, speaking at small colleges, attending French public debates, and staying in boutique hotels, are so elite that they make him seem divorced from the madness he is attempting to write the definitive book on.
From the pitch and blurb, you would learn that his latest book is about the mania in the air mid-2020, when people were locked in, too online, seeing mad things happening on their phone, and getting pissed off, and a Blinkist summary would tell you that it hits all the beats you’d expect. There are lockdowns, Portland, George Floyd, the Jussie Smollett incident, the Black Square Instagram campaign, Kenosha, cancel culture, and even Jan. 6. The afterword is about the lingering whiffs of crazy that have come up around Israel in the months and years following Oct. 7.
The actual book, however, is messy. It’s a mood poem on 2020, wafting through a series of loose essays about George Floyd or Portland. Each story drifts off into quotes from articles and citations for philosophers and away from the core subject, which isn’t actually the general madness of 2020, but rather how much Williams dislikes the “anti-racism” arguments advocated by writers who had their moment then, such as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and others.
Reading back on this stuff, it’s hard to believe any of it was taken seriously. Nikole Hannah-Jones was never a serious person, and she should have been laughed out of the general conversation the moment she tweeted about Kyle Rittenhouse: “In this country, you can even kill white people and get away with it if those white people are fighting for Black lives. This is the legacy of 1619.”
This, and many of the anti-racist points brought up in the book, are obviously stupid, and that’s the problem. They’re so facially absurd that you don’t need Williams to debunk them. Yet, when was the last time you heard from Kendi? Hannah-Jones writes one article every two or so months, and none of them are particularly impactful. DiAngelo has presumably retired to swim, Scrooge McDuck-like, in a giant pool of corporate-consulting cash. All these people have vanished from the discourse, so why should we be invested in what they said five years ago?
And, more than being out of time, some of Williams’ arguments are not particularly persuasive, either. In part, it seems this is because he grants too much to his opponents. For example, he writes that the collapse in faith in former President Barack Obama occurred more because of the president’s race than his policies. Rather, the racial optimism of the years around 2010 seems like one strand of a general “HOPE”-poster Democratic utopianism. The feelings produced in leftwing quarters about the fact that America under Obama’s governance felt more or less like it always had were probably the inevitable disappointment of anyone who hopes for things that are not practicable.
Elitism and a related underlying doomed need for the approval of liberal sophisticates may partially explain Williams’ focus on the racial ideas rather than some of the other madnesses of 2020. Namely, as a remote-working writer, the race stuff (for lack of a better phrase) infected Williams’s own world. But other, race-neutral shades of that madness affected people in more profound ways. Those who were told they couldn’t attend funerals for loved ones don’t get mentioned, let alone quoted. California pouring sand into outdoor skate parks while Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) dined at The French Laundry Kitchen was also not mentioned despite its enormous radicalizing effect. Neither are the reversals on masking advice. This book is almost exclusively focused on wokeness and “anti-racism.”
It’s therefore hard to tell who Summer of Our Discontent is aimed at. With the extensive, unnecessary throat-clearing — “Let us be painstakingly clear: What happened to Floyd outside the Cup Foods convenience store was an atrocity; it was murder without qualification” — it seems that it’s meant for a left-of-center readership who’ve never heard about white police killing victim Tony Timpa, and who unquestioningly deified George Floyd. But how many of those people would buy a book from Williams? If you’re even slightly literate about the American Right and Williams’ prior work, there’s little new here.
Unfortunately, as though the complaints listed already weren’t enough, Summer of Discontent is Williams’ worst-written book. He’s an immensely talented writer, and you see it in moments such as his chapter on the French response to le wokisme, or his retelling of Jan. 6 and the Rittenhouse incident. Both events have been covered to exhaustion, yet his sections on them are impactful in a way I don’t think I’ve felt before. But these moments that speak to his talents are the exception in this latest volume.
Too often, the book is redundant or dry, which would be true even without the avalanche of (often very long) footnotes. The footnotes continually pull you out of the flow, particularly when they run over most of a page, and no editor should allow a book to go to press with footnotes taking up roughly 15% of the word count. Then there is the fact that much of the content is not original to the work. Williams writes about James Bennett’s defenestration at the New York Times, but there’s little here that Bennett doesn’t provide better in his long Economist essay on the episode, which Williams credits as “an extraordinary document worth reading in its entirety.” So why am I reading this? The book’s excellent chapter on France is essentially a light rewrite of a piece he wrote in the March 2023 edition of the Atlantic. Even readers who think this is a talented author covering topics on which they agree with him will find their eyes glazing over.
Perhaps the book suffers under the weight of its expectations. There have been plenty of pandemic policy books and COVID-19 origin books, but there ought to have been one that truly captured this moment where the world went mad. And Williams is the kind of writer who could have done so. But, for whatever reason, he has chosen to leave us with something waftier instead.
Ross Anderson is the life editor at the Spectator World and a tech and culture contributor for the New York Sun.