Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, which drops from Knopf in March, is about the people brave or stupid enough to challenge the narratives of the “deep state” after 9/11. It is a Journalist and the Murderer redux, only the murderers are state-sanctioned, and the journalist is the government. The story the “deep state” tells about itself is, at best, curated; at worst, made up. Flaks broadcast a specific version of events, while actors on the inside must refrain from publicly pointing out errors or spoiling plot points. As intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has pointed out, there is a significant gap between “two worlds”: “the world in America, and the world I was seeing.”
