Originally published in Compact.

The Message
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World, 256 pages

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fundamental problem is that he is a narcissist. Other people interest him only insofar as they reflect his own thoughts and feelings. That is what makes him such a bad reporter, a shortcoming he freely admits to. “Part of me would have done anything to go home,” he writes in his new book The Message, about his 10-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in the summer of 2023. “The part that always grouses about the rigors of reporting, the awkwardness of asking strangers intimate questions, the discipline of listening intently.” Readers, if listening to other people is a chore, then journalism might not be the career for you.

It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it. Every reporter knows the a-ha moment of living through the anecdote that will make the perfect lead or kicker. No such perfect anecdotes have ever happened to Coates or, if they did, he was oblivious to them. His previous book, Between the World and Me, was an indictment of America as a racist hellscape, yet the worst act of racism he recounted from his own life—not something he read about in a newspaper or a history book—was a white lady on an escalator who shouted at his dawdling son, who was blocking her way, “Come on!”

The pivotal firsthand anecdote in this new book is equally underwhelming. At a checkpoint outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers made his party of a dozen or so people wait for 45 minutes. That’s it. “Was it that we had cameras? Was it that our guide was Jordanian? No justifications were given, no questions asked, no instructions offered,” he writes. “Watching those soldiers stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs, I could feel the lens of my mind curving to refract the blur of new and strange events.”

Read the rest at Compact.