The Spectators

Matthew Miller, known on air as Mattie, built a career on hosting a television program that digs up odd and disturbing private lives and displays them before a huge studio audience. Few people, whether viewers or the colleagues who spend each day with him, really know who he is. When students who carried out a school shooting turn out to have been fans of his show, the media turns on Mattie and casts him as a cool, aloof symbol of a society that has lost its bearings. As public attention intensifies, buried chapters of his earlier life begin to resurface. Those chapters include his years as a promising young politician in a New York City riddled with crime.

Jennifer duBois tells the story through two people who watch Mattie closely: Cel, the skeptical publicist who handles his image, and Semi, a former lover who has grown disillusioned with him. The novel moves between the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, and a behind-the-scenes look at 1990s television during a period of moral panic. Its nostalgic view of New York and its focus on reinvention make it as much a study of public life as a portrait of one man's fall.

The Spectators asks what we choose to look at and why, and it questions the appetite for spectacle that drives modern media. Its tone is sharp and intelligent, and it mixes a suspenseful public downfall with the quieter weight of a life shaped by a different era.