In February of this year, the Washington Post laid off roughly 30 percent of its workforce, hastening a death spiral that had begun with billionaire Jeff Bezos’s acquisition of the storied paper. This round of layoffs included the majority of the foreign news correspondents (not to mention the entire Books desk). Lizzie Johnson, one of the reporters let go, wrote on X that she had received this news while in the middle of the Ukrainian war zone; she posted a photo of herself working by headlamp in the back of a freezing car, a typical scenario for a war journalist. Every member of the Middle East desk was let go, even with the Gaza genocide ongoing and the United States and Israel weeks away from bombing Iran and, in Israel’s case, Lebanon. When NPR interviewed some of the Post’s laid-off veterans of dangerous overseas assignments, I noticed all of them were women.
I was thinking about this when I read Midnight, at the War, the sixth book and third novel from novelist and poet Devi S. Laskar. The novel shows us two years in the life of one female war correspondent—just the type of worker who has been cast aside so cavalierly by distant men in power. Midnight, at the War follows Rita Das, an American print journalist reporting from an unnamed and ostensibly fictional city-state in the area of Southwest Asia and North Africa. The novel begins in 2003 and then reorients us in 2001, when Rita first takes the assignment that keeps her far from her husband—a magazine writer who also works overseas—her best friend, and her father and cancer-stricken mother in the States.
In the unnamed Arabic-speaking country, site of an unnamed war, Rita looks for stories that will satisfy her exacting stateside editor, Hughes. One day, she witnesses a kidnapping that will entwine her with the fortunes of her translator and his wife. Subsequently, she is called home by Hughes and her ailing mother, but her flight coincides with the September 11 attacks, which throw her plans into turmoil along with the rest of the world and cause her to miss her mother’s death. The rest of the novel brings us along as Rita faces a complex family history, competing love interests, and a series of choices she must make about her life.
Rita is a woman pulled in many directions. Even her name is porous. Her birth certificate reads Elena Indrakshi Keppler, the name bestowed by her white Midwestern dad and Bengali mother, but professionally she uses her mother’s surname and a childhood nickname drawn from West Side Story. As Rita navigates the chaos of the overseas airport and the frantic competing demands of her local colleagues—who lack the privileges of her own passport—and her dying mother, we are taken back to memories of her early days in a U.S. newsroom, a relationship with a philandering colleague, and the toll taken by years of reporting traumatic stories in service of keeping the public informed. Midnight, at the War proves to be a hectic novel with sometimes-uneven pacing. Still, a generous reader might read the choppiness of the narrative as formally true to the life of a character moving through the dust of shelling and airports in disarray, all the while juggling personal conflicts that refuse to be ignored.
The novel’s strengths are the truths it surfaces about the meaning of “news” for those of us born in the so-called American Century. There’s a risk that leaving the foreign country unnamed contributes to an essentializing view that there’s always a war of one kind or another in this part of the world. But in another light, the choice calls attention to the flattening of places and people that occurs because of the prerogatives of the Western newsroom, with its dual need to sensationalize and simplify. One of Rita’s journalistic preoccupations is the underreported violence experienced by women worldwide, but Laskar is careful to show that violence is a phenomenon that exists across borders—not that it is without causes but that, despite the specificity of local contexts, it is not endemic to any one place. When Rita is back in the United States after September 11, her beat becomes the string of real-life murders and assaults on brown people there by white men inflamed by racism.
There’s a bitter nostalgia in reading about column inches and answering machines and gruff editors in newsrooms bristling with toxic masculinity. Laskar worked for years as a reporter, and the novel is full of details that feel earned, driving home the sacrifices that are routine for female journalists—and the particular weight carried by women of color. We see the difficulties that a career in news poses to their personal lives and their psyches as they fight to tell stories overlooked by their bosses—or fight to use the word occupation—in a newsroom where the truth is an editorial choice to be negotiated. While the events and conflicts of the novel are of their period, Laskar makes them resonate in our own violent present, just at the moment when the professional world she describes in lively detail is rapidly slipping away through cowardice, carelessness, and greed. In many ways, it’s already gone.•
