When The Americans—which I came to think of as possibly the best TV show I’d ever watched—came to its conclusion last week, I looked back at what I’d written in 2013 when it was new and, in my view, pretty silly.
I quoted le Carré reflecting on the novel that made him famous: “The merit of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then—or its offense, depending where you stood—was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.” Even if that novel didn’t depict the spy game exactly as it was, it depicted it in a way that that readers readily—perhaps gratefully—accepted. Authenticity is something we leave to the experts to write essays about; credibility is what our hearts tell us is true. Merely a point to be made in passing in 2013, it’s a much more urgent distinction now. We have a president who says a lot of things that to his flock feel credible. If credible, they don’t need to be true. Truth is something of a side issue.
