The Death of Truth
by Michiko Kakutani
(William Collins, £10)

WHEN Michiko Kakutani retired as chief book critic for the New York Times last year, novelists breathed a united sigh of relief. Since leaving her post, she has turned her eye to the US of Donald Trump’s America and produced this slight and histrionically titled polemic.

Her book is a totemic example of the US liberal intelligentsia’s take on Trump exceptionalism — his uncouth manner, untrammelled bellicosity and general cavalier attitude towards policy are seen as beyond the pale.

The dust jacket promises “an impassioned critique of the West’s retreat from reason” and, for the uninitiated, Kakutani offers a succinct account of postmodern thought from its germination in academia from the 1960s. She highlights the dispensing of Enlightenment narratives of progress and its complicating of conventional notions of objectivity and truth.

But to see these academic debates as migrating into the mainstream, then culminating in the aberration of Trump’s presidency, conveniently forgets how the US state has been complicating notions of truth in the country and overturning democracies that don’t comply with its economic imperialism.

“The state never has any use for truth as such but only truth which is useful to it,” runs one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, but it could have been a motto for the US throughout the 20th century.

While providing an overall convincing survey of the cultural and intellectual milieu that undergirds the “post-truth” epoch, Kakutani's book only ever skirts the economic context.  At one point, she remarks that “populist messages, historians attest, tend to gain traction during times of economic uncertainty” but never bothers to ask why such times of economic uncertainty come about in the first place.

The Death of Truth is strongest when it turns to Kakutani’s expertise in literature, mining the works of writers like Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace for their predictive insights into the burgeoning, media-saturated age of the late 20^th century US. Yet her literary analogies for Trump’s presidency lean heavily upon Orwell’s 1984, endlessly invoked by journalists just after his inauguration, which seems a touch embarrassing for a former book critic.

After nine funereal chapters, Kakutani concludes with a limp appeal to defend the democracy established by the Founding Fathers, approvingly quoting Thomas Jefferson’s plea to “unite in common effort for the common good.”

Surely now, more than ever, is a time to radically reimagine the US republic and how it can deliver this common good in an utterly changed world rather than retreating into reactionary nostalgia.