The West's post-9/11 preference for information-boggle over truth-telling gets a blunt reckoning in The Room and the Chair, Lorraine Adams's forceful follow-up to her well-received 2004 novel, Harbor. Adams sidesteps individual blame for this systemic moral torpor (the events take place at the end of the last administration, but none of the usual suspects are named) in favor of a collective study of an impressively sprawling, prodigiously flawed ensemble. Indeed, The Room and the Chair makes a compelling case that the deteriorating state of reality-based America is a collective effort—and that