Toward the end of this hideous week of gun massacres and Presidential tantrums, I found myself manacled at the ankle to a bench in a holding cell in the basement of a police station in the upstate New York city of Glens Falls, wondering if it was a useful place to be.

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On Thursday morning, I’d left my house in the Adirondack forest and driven an hour out of the mountains to Glens Falls. It’s not a glamorous city—it built its prosperity on paper mills—but I’ve always felt at home there. My daughter was born in the Glens Falls Hospital; I researched parts of my first book in the stacks of its fine Crandall Public Library; it is “town” in this part of the world. But it’s not Vermont, where I now live most of the year, or Brooklyn, or San Francisco, or the other sorts of places where people are more likely to engage in civil protest. Warren County, which it anchors, is classic rural red: Trump territory in the 2016 election, and by a fairly sizable margin.

So, when friends told me that there’d be a protest in support of the immigrants being held in detention centers on the southern border, I wondered if anyone would show up. About seventy-five people were gathered in leafy City Park when I arrived, which seemed to me a good turnout, even if many of them had driven north half an hour from the considerably hipper city of Saratoga Springs. For an hour, people listened to earnest speeches—including one from a Skidmore professor recently back from Texas with grim tales of separated families—and to folk songs, and to a rabbi blowing a shofar with considerable vigor.

And then we walked three or four blocks through the center of town, chanting, “No More Hate!,” until we were outside the office of Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican, who represents New York’s Twenty-first Congressional District. When we arrived, a crowd perhaps a third the size of our group was already in place, carrying Trump banners and chanting their own slogans: “Americans before illegals,” “Build the wall,” and “Four more years.” (One woman was holding a sign that just said “CAPITALISM,” and only because she was wearing a MAGA hat could I be sure of her politics.) It was tense, especially since the local police—unaccustomed, I think, to this sort of thing—simply stood by and let the two sides face off. There was a certain amount of middle-fingering from the Trump contingent and tut-tutting from our side. Mostly, it was noisy, because the leader of the Trumpists had a bullhorn that he could (and did) set to siren mode, largely drowning out the earnest attempts to sing “This Land Is Your Land” and “America the Beautiful.” After a little while, our group decamped back to the park, and mostly dispersed.

Six of us, however, went back to the Stefanik’s office and sat in the reception area, telling the pleasant receptionist that we were planning to stay until we could talk to the congresswoman—over the phone, or via Skype, or some such. She said she was phoning Washington, and then told us that Stefanik was unavailable, and then announced that the office was closed, and then that she was summoning the police, which was more or less what we’d guessed would happen. While we sat there waiting, I ate a number of butterscotch candies that had been put out in a bowl on a side table, and admired a map of the district, which runs from Saratoga to the Canadian border and west across the mountains to Lake Ontario. I know that country as well as I know any place on earth, and I love it more deeply than any other—it is the great wilderness of the East, bordered by cities, rivers, and farms, and set somewhat apart from the bustle of the rest of the world.

A detective in a sports jacket soon arrived, and, after huddling with the receptionist and a nice young man spending a college summer as an intern, he told us that we would have to leave, or we would be put under arrest. “I don’t see why it would do you any good to be arrested,” he said, which, actually, was a reasonable point. I doubted that it would change anyone’s mind if we were carted away. And yet it seemed, somehow, like a necessary, if modest, gesture of solidarity with the people sitting for months on end in holding pens in the desert.

For me, immigration, in particular, has become a larger and more pressing issue over the years. That’s because I mostly work on the question of climate change, and it’s become very clear that a rapidly heating planet is already driving many people to move. In Central America, for instance, recent reporting has made it clear that drought and heat have made it hard to grow food in the highlands of Honduras and Guatemala, starting many farmers on the journey that eventually takes them to the U.S. border. These people did not pour into the atmosphere the carbon that raised the temperature, causing their woe. (That was us.) And, as this week’s report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) makes clear, there will be infinitely more of them as the century grinds hotly on. The U.N. estimates that we can expect somewhere between two hundred million and a billion climate refugees on the move around the world. We have to try to slow down that heating, of course, but we also have to come up with ways to help our fellow-humans endure this new world. Cages and walls—and ranting about “invasions”—are as ugly as they are pointless.

And so the perfectly professional Glens Falls police officers cuffed us and took us to the station, where we were chained by the ankle and, eventually, processed and released, and told to return to court in a couple of weeks to answer to charges of criminal trespass in the third degree. A legal-aid lawyer said that the possible sentence was a term of three months, which I devoutly hope is not the case—a few hours was dreary enough. But it’s a good reminder that there are many people effectively sentenced to terms like that on the border—people who can’t find their children, people who have no real home to go back to. We can’t be like them, those of us who have options and resources and connections. But we can, in some small way, be with them.

In the Trump era, political dilemmas can arise at any moment. Members of the luxury gym Equinox learned this the hard way this week, when news broke that the gym’s owner, the billionaire real-estate mogul Stephen Ross, would be hosting a big-ticket fund-raiser for Donald Trump in the Hamptons. Ross, who is one of the richest people in America, also owns the Miami Dolphins and SoulCycle, and has partial ownership of several restaurants, including Momofuku and Milk Bar. The fund-raiser was set to take place at Ross’s home on Friday afternoon, and guests included Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary. A hundred-thousand-dollar ticket bought a donor lunch and a photo op with the President; two hundred and fifty thousand dollars bought a seat at a roundtable discussion. Equinox is conspicuously not targeted at the MAGA demographic. The company regularly participates in L.G.B.T.Q. Pride parades. Its current ads feature oiled models receiving pedicures in the nude and watering marijuana gardens. Some members quit the gym with dramatic social-media sign-offs. “Hey @Equinox,” the comedian Billy Eichner tweeted. “What’s your policy for canceling memberships once a member finds out your owner is enabling racism and mass murder?”

Those who worked out at the gym this week seemed to be engrossed in a complicated moral arithmetic. “I come here for a trainer,” a brunette writer explained, at the gym’s SoHo location, which has a juice bar on the first floor and a grand staircase. “I guess I don’t feel the need to defend myself.” She’d just finished a workout and was having a drink called Supa Dupa Greens and a bowl of Superfood Mousse in the gym’s mezzanine lounge-café. She loathed Trump, she said, but she loved her trainer, and she had already paid for multiple sessions. “That’s the problem,” she said. “I bought a package. And the membership fee is on top of that.” She could cancel, and lose the fees to Ross’s company. “But I don’t know,” she said. “Is there a symbolic value in me forfeiting all the money to this shithead?”

On the other hand, she thinks of herself as a conscious consumer. When the #GrabYourWallet campaign launched in response to Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape, in 2016, urging people to boycott companies that had connections to Trump, she joined in. “I e-mailed Zappos, because they carried Ivanka’s shoes, and I said, ‘I won’t shop here anymore.’ And I haven’t.” The following year, Nordstrom stopped carrying Ivanka’s clothing line. The movement later targeted Uber, forcing its C.E.O. at the time, Travis Kalanick, to step down from Trump’s economic advisory council. The writer was going to discuss the possibility of boycotting Equinox with her trainer, who, she added, is gay and a person of color. “I know he sees people outside of Equinox, so maybe that’s what we’ll do,” she said.

Just inside the door to the gym, an interior-design graduate student was moping. “I joined this gym three days ago,” he said. “Billy Eichner posted about this . . . and I was, like, ‘Fuuuck.’ ” Now he was stuck in an “ethical quandary,” he said. On one hand, “I feel like I should follow my convictions and leave the gym.” On the other, “I just paid, I think it was, like, five hundred dollars for the month, with the initiation fee.” He added, “And there is no comparable option this close to my apartment!” He’d talked it over with his boyfriend, who pointed out that Ross was also behind Hudson Yards, the luxury development in Manhattan. “Are we going to avoid that, too?” he asked. “If we avoided everything he owns, our quality of life would go down considerably.” It was weighing on him, though. “Between the two of us, we agreed that I would explore if there was a grace period where I can still cancel my membership,” he said.

A Venezuelan screenwriter said he was thinking about trying CrossFit. He’d avoided the gym for a day. “Now that I’m here, I’m feeling really bad,” he said. Other members wondered if there were alternatives to cancelling. An architect at Equinox’s High Line location, in Chelsea, suggested that the gym’s members and employees could form a kind of “junta” within Related Companies, Ross’s corporation, and force him to stop holding Trump fund-raisers. He also claimed to take inspiration from the recent demonstrations in Puerto Rico, which have ousted two governors in quick succession. “They created a cultural festival—a celebration of a protest—through dance, salsa, ballet, music, pot-banging, yoga,” he said. “And they were effective in creating change.” Could Equinox members do something like that?

In an attempt to quell the controversy, Ross released a statement noting that he had known Trump for forty years and, though he disagreed with the President on certain issues, he had always felt comfortable voicing those disagreements. “While some prefer to sit outside of the process and criticize, I prefer to engage directly and support the things I deeply care about,” he said. Equinox claimed in a separate statement that Ross was a “passive investor,” and attempted to distance itself from the fund-raiser. “We want to let you know that Equinox and SoulCycle have nothing to do with the event and do not support it,” the statement read. SoulCycle tweeted a message from Melanie Whelan, its C.E.O., addressed “To our Soul Family,” noting that “at SoulCycle, we wake up every day committed to our community, and creating a safe space where all are welcome.” David Chang, the celebrity chef whose restaurants are owned by Ross, noted on his podcast, “No one’s more fucking pissed off than me.”

Not all consumers were mollified. A marketer and photographer at the Equinox in Chelsea said that he had friends who were cancelling their memberships. “I get what they’re saying,” he said. “Our money is directly going to this guy who’s then hosting a Trump benefit.” On the other hand, he said, “it’s only a little bit of money. Is it really worth it? I haven’t made up my mind.” At the very least, he was going to stop giving Equinox free advertising by “checking in” to the gym on social media. “Sometimes I’ll post, like, a Boomerang”—a short, looped video—“of me walking into the gym, so you can see the Equinox logo,” he said. “I’ve already decided I won’t be doing that.”

A previous version of this post misstated the number of governors ousted by the protests in Puerto Rico.

After the massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, Latinos across America are feeling shaken and terrified. Aura Bogado, an investigative reporter at Reveal, a publication from the Center for Investigative Reporting, asked her Latino followers on Twitter how they were feeling after the shootings. The last time I checked, she had five hundred and one public answers, most of them full of anguish: parents relieved that their children had fair skin, mothers afraid to take their children to school when classes resume, and lots of people frightened to speak Spanish in public. Ana Dopico, a professor of comparative literature at New York University who is currently working on a book in Miami, replied in the thread that she was now “constantly monitoring accents & reactions to Spanish usage.” Bogado told me, “There was an assumption that this was something that happened somewhere else”—in places with a long history of anti-Latino sentiment. “But the fact that this kind of supremacist violence happens in places in which Latinx have grown safe is scary, and people are coming to terms with that.”

Latinos were already feeling under attack before the massacre. Adrián Carrasquillo, a political reporter, shared a story on Twitter from a young Latina woman, who said that last month, in Austin, a woman told her to “go back to Mexico,” and threatened to throw things at her if she didn’t cross the street into oncoming traffic. The most recent data from the Federal Bureau of Investigations shows a sharp uptick in hate crimes since Donald Trump was elected President, eleven per cent of which targeted Latinos. A 2018 Pew Center poll found that a record number of Latinos were pessimistic about their place in the United States and the future of their children, with more than half of Latinos saying that it has become more difficult for them to live here.

This week, many Latinos expressed fear that two main external indicators of Latinidad—the brownness of one’s skin and the use of Spanish in public—might trigger people to physically attack them. I am not brown, but I know the feeling. Last spring, I was with my seven-year-old son in a bakery in a dreamy little town in the Berkshires. We were discussing, in Spanish, what kind of pastry to buy. The cashier, a young white woman, gave us a confused glance, and, for a fraction of a second, a freezing shiver ran down my spine, and I lowered my voice. Then she explained that she couldn’t place where we were from, and asked us.

I had made a wrong assumption, but the fear I felt was real. A couple of years earlier, a writer whose child was playing with mine in an Upper East Side playground asked me, out of the blue, if we identified as Hispanics. I said that that was a complicated question, and, before I could elaborate, he added, “Because if a policeman came into this playground and looked at your son, he would see a Hispanic kid.” To this day, I don’t know what to make of that statement. But the fact that he thought the police might be looking at, or for my son—that, to my interlocutor, this was something to be considered, foreseen, in this country—was not reassuring.

To fight this fear, I think that we have to go against our instincts to blend in and to pass undetected. What is needed is more visibility. Of course, this is a tall order for all of our communities, after El Paso, let alone those that include undocumented immigrants, who have specific reasons not to show themselves (and please, please, CNN, stop calling them “illegal”). But Latino visibility is not a responsibility that should only fall on Latino communities.

The news-media industry must play a role, and that role starts with reviewing the way it portrays Latinos in its coverage. The wonderful complexity of Latino communities has for too long been lost on mainstream America, as Latinos have been misunderstood, underreported, stigmatized, and grouped into an indistinguishable mass only defined by the immigrant experience and by assumed fluency in Spanish, which many, but not all, Latinos actually speak. In fact, Latinos in the United States comprise a wildly diverse population, from families that have lived in New Mexico, Texas, and California since before the Mexican-American War to Puerto Ricans, who live in a U.S. territory, and Latin Americans who have emigrated from many different countries throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century.

There is no agreement about the term “Latino” either: many people prefer to call themselves Hispanics, or Chicanos, or Mexicanos, Dominicanos, Cubanos, Colombianos, Ecuatorianos, Salvadoreños, Hondureños, Guatemaltecos, Venezolanos, and so on, and point out that labels like “Latino” are applied to very different people, coming from different countries, for very different reasons, at different times in history.

Far too few of them, however, are working in American newsrooms. In the Latino Media Gap, a comprehensive study of the portrayal of Latinos by mainstream media, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, a filmmaker and professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, noted, “Whereas the Latino population grew more than 43% from 2000 to 2010, the rate of media participation—behind and in front of the camera, and across all genres and formats—stayed stagnant or grew only slightly, at times proportionally declining.” And when Latinos are visible, Negrón Muntaner wrote, “they tend to be portrayed through decades-old stereotypes as criminals, law enforcers, cheap labor, and hypersexualized beings.”

According to a 2018 diversity survey from the American Society of News Editors, today less than seven per cent of journalists in newsrooms are Latino, even though Latinos make up eighteen per cent of the country’s population. On Tuesday, the reporter Esmeralda Bermudez, who writes about Latinos for the Los Angeles Times (in a city that is forty-nine per cent Latino) tweeted images of the front pages of eight of the largest newspapers in the country, including her own, and commented, “Reading headlines across the U.S. today you wouldn’t know that one of the deadliest hate crimes against Latinos happened 3 days ago. You wouldn’t see victims faces or get any hint of how Latinos feel. You would know that Trump condemned bigotry, assailed hate, denounced racism.”

Given that history, the first thing that newsrooms should do is to welcome more Latino voices and treat them with the respect due to any journalist in this country. Just this spring, a young Latina reporter I know was asked by her editor, at a major metropolitan newspaper, if she was planning on delivering her story “in Spanish or English,” even though the publication only runs English-language stories and the reporter grew up speaking English, in New York City.

Spanish-language television networks should be invited to host more Presidential debates. Univision and Telemundo are competitive in ratings with ABC, NBC, and CBS, often beating them in prime-time segments, but, so far, they have only hosted debates during the Democratic primaries. And their participation should be considered, and presented, as equal to that of their Anglo counterparts. When Univision hosted a Presidential debate in 2007, the Associated Press reported, “Not surprisingly for anchors who vocally support a path to legalization for the nation’s estimated 12 million immigrants, both [Jorge] Ramos and [María Elena] Salinas framed their questions with the basic assumption that immigrants, including those in the country illegally, face discrimination and have been unfairly demonized—a view not universally shared in the English-language media.” Not incidentally, when Ramos was forcibly removed from a Trump-campaign news conference, in 2015, after Trump shouted at him, “Go back to Univision,” most of his fellow-reporters not only stayed in the room conducting business as usual but publicly blamed the episode on Ramos.

This is why it was so important that Democratic candidates spoke in Spanish during the first debate, and why it was so troubling that they were mocked for doing so. This is also why it is so damaging when journalists criticize Julián Castro for not speaking perfect Spanish—as if fluency in Spanish were the test of being a real Latino, and Castro had to pass—and praise Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg for speaking it “so well.” During his tenure as mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg started addressing journalists in Spanish, though he, too, was teased for his accent. That gesture, a veteran Spanish-language TV reporter told me, helped legitimize Spanish-language media in the city. For years, he said, Spanish-language reporters had to wait until the end of the press conference and grab the speaker before he or she left the room to ask their questions. Today, if the person who is delivering the press conference is fluent in Spanish, Spanish-language journalists can ask questions at any time.

Spanish-language news media should not be seen as foreign by English-language reporters, or as anything less than intrinsic to America’s media industry. Last year, the Denver Post got the attention of the mainstream media by revolting against its hedge-funder owners, who were laying off thirty people from a newsroom of about a hundred, and publicly called the owners “vulture capitalists.” Univision, which is also owned by private-equity firms, was dealing with the same fate; between 2017 and 2018, the award-winning digital-news operation was reduced to about a third of its original size. Media critics and Anglo media reporters everywhere were moved by the Denver Post story, but the case of Univision was utterly ignored.

In other words, Latinos should be seen for what we are: not “the other,” but a part of “us.” We’re given broad labels like ‘Latino’ or ‘Hispanic.’ If we were considered part of us, part of America, then there wouldn’t be a need to define us with any other name.

We have been telling this to you—us—for decades.

Please, listen.

If you want a tip on a great thriller, you could do a lot worse than to follow the advice of Stephen King. In a New York Times review, he raved about a book called “The Witch Elm,” the most recent mystery novel by the writer Tana French. French has been called the queen of Irish crime fiction, although she is originally American, and she’s often called a mystery writer for people who don’t read mysteries. Maybe that sounds like faint praise, but make no mistake: fans of French are almost crazily devoted to her books.

Alexandra Schwartz: Tana, I need to begin with a confession. I have to ration your books because, once I start one, I am totally lost to the world. If I have anything else going on at that moment in my life, I am just not going to be able to do it.

Tana French: I like being a bad influence.

You didn’t start writing until you were in your thirties, which might seem to some readers relatively late. Before that you were an actor, and I was wondering how that change came about.

To be honest, it was sort of always in the cards. I used to write when I was a kid, when I was a teen-ager: we’re talking short stories, and your basic, really terrible teen-age poetry. But the acting sort of took over. I was doing theatre and, unless you’re Judi Dench or somebody, the gigs don’t line up right, so there’s always a gap in between, and in one gap I did a few weeks on an archeological dig. There was a wood not far from the dig, and I was looking at it and thinking, That would be a great place for kids to play, and then I thought, What if three kids ran in there and only one came out, and he had no memory of what had happened to the other two? And then, What if he became a detective and a case drew him back to that wood? I really want to know what would happen with that story. I didn’t think I could write a whole book; I’d never tried before, but I figured I could probably write maybe a scene and then another scene, and then I had a whole chapter. Kind of the moment when I found myself turning down acting work, I think that was when I realized that I was really, really serious about this book, and from there on it sort of all followed, and that book was “In the Woods,” which was published in 2007.

To write a thriller, or a crime novel, or a mystery—and I wonder, actually, if there’s a term that you prefer for your own books—takes a lot of intricate plotting. You have to lead your reader on a bunch of twists and turns. How did you manage to figure out plotting for that first book?

Plotting is not my strong point. I’m pretty at home with characterization, because acting is really good training for that, and I’m at home with the actual sentence-to-sentence writing. Structure is the part that I have put a lot of work into getting right. It’s not a part that comes naturally to me, but also I’m lucky: my husband is an actor, as well, and he directs films, and he has a demon eye for structure, right? Because he’s watched every old film in the universe, and so he’s very good on structure, so he reads for me, and he’ll go, O.K., hang on a second, that is not fitting together structurally, that subplot has got lost, or you’re not moving that scene forward enough. But I think, in some ways, mystery was actually a very good way to learn that, because it’s got such a built-in arc. You know A kills B, and then C finds out whodunnit. So that keeps you on track, to some extent. I think if I’d been writing something like straight literary fiction it would have been much easier to just keep on writing forever and never stop, whereas at least mystery has a clean arc that you have to stick to.

The partner dynamic is, to me, such a satisfying part of reading your books, that kind of back-and-forth that goes on between partners, and Rob and Cassie, in “In the Woods,” embody it to a T. Could you could read a passage where Rob describes feeling this way?

Yeah, absolutely:

How did you learn the vernacular of detective work in order to write these books?

Well, I’m lucky. I know a retired detective who is a really lovely guy, and he’s also a serious talker. So all you have to do is press play, buy him a nice cup of coffee, say, “Talk to me,” and he’ll just keep talking until the coffee runs out. He has been so generous with his time, and that’s where I’m getting the flavor of these little things—the dynamics, to an extent, the partner relationship. That’s something that’s always fascinated me, which is going to sound weird for a writer who works alone, but I love working with people. One of the things I miss most from acting is the teamwork of it: when you’re doing a scene with somebody and it’s a difficult scene, and it’s one that you know can be amazing if you get it right, and you’re working with somebody where you’re really attuned to each other, and you can throw anything at them and know they’ll bounce it back to you with something more added. It’s an amazing feeling. It’s one of the real joys of acting. And I was thinking about detectives and going, What would it be like to have that relationship where you were so tuned in to each other that you’re working practically as one, and have it be life and death and truth and justice on the line? When it works, [it’s] an incredible thing.

Your books are set in Dublin, and you are not originally from Dublin. When did you come to Dublin? What was it about the city that fascinated you, that drew you in?

Yeah, I’m an international brat. I think the official term is “third-culture kid,” isn’t it? I grew up moving around: my parents are from several continents between them, and when I went to college it just seemed like the natural place to go. It was the place I knew best. This seems like the natural place to be. I’m here since 1990.

So you were here—or there, rather—during the Celtic Tiger, which is something that comes through in all of your books, the period of astonishing growth that transformed Ireland from a relatively poor country into a rich one, and then came crashing down with the international crash in 2008. What was that like to live through?

That was very strange to live through, in particular from the point of view of a broke actor who wasn’t actually participating in the Celtic Tiger in any way. We were constantly being told by the government, by the media, by everyone around us during the Celtic Tiger that what was happening was wonderful. But, from our perspective, this just meant I have no chance of ever buying a house, and my rent is skyrocketing. And then, when it all came crashing down, the people who suffered the most psychologically weren’t the people like me, who had been outside it anyway. I couldn’t have afforded a shed in the middle of nowhere during the Celtic Tiger, but the people who were hurt worst were the people who had believed in this narrative implicitly and thrown themselves into it, who had bought those apartments off the plans, bought the houses built on flood plains, because they believed that in five years you’ll be able to sell it for triple the price to another sucker, and you’ll all live happily ever after. I think that, for those of us who hadn’t been playing by the rules anyway, it was less devastating, but we still saw that devastation. And my generation is the one that got kicked particularly hard. So, yeah, it’s seeped through, into the books.

You’re basically describing a victimization narrative where, en masse, people are given a bait-and-switch. They’re led to believe one thing, and it turns out that the truth is something very different, and that’s something that comes back in such a fascinating and rich way in novel after novel of yours. I think we should say, especially for people who haven’t read these books, that the detectives are all pretty damaged people. They are not the most reliable narrators, even when they believe themselves to be. Often there are memory issues, which you use to manipulate the information around them: they either remember things that didn’t happen or have memory problems. Why are you drawn to that kind of detective? Many mystery writers like to create a sort of figure of authority who is going through a twisted, shadowy world, but is ultimately going to bring truth to light. Even when the truth comes to light in your books, it may not be the whole truth, and it may not matter, for practical purposes, whether the truth is out at all.

Yeah, it doesn’t always reimpose order. I am fascinated by unreliable narrators, because I think that one of the core points of the arts is to give us a glimpse of what it’s like to be someone else, to see the world for a little while through someone else’s eyes, and to realize that other people have viewpoints that are completely different from our own, and that those are just as real and intense and vivid and valid. And—this is going to sound odd—but I think an unreliable narrator does that best, because we are all unreliable writers of our own lives. We all reshape our own narratives to make them fit what we want to believe or what we need or just what interests us most. Like, if you’ve got siblings, and the two of you tell a story about some argument that happened in your childhood. You’re gonna get two completely different versions of that argument, because both of you have shaped the narrative to fit what suits your thoughts best. If you’re reading an unreliable narrator, that’s what brings you closest to the person, because you’re not seeing their experience objectively. You’re seeing it the way they see it, which is through their thoughts, through their biases, through their needs and their fears and their desires. So I think an unreliable narrator is the one you know most intimately, ironically, and the one who comes closest to fulfilling what the arts are really for.

It’s funny, what you say about siblings. I’m an only child, so I’m sitting here thinking, Yeah, yeah, but I know what really happened in this story, and it occurs to me that Toby, the narrator of “The Witch Elm,” is also an only child, and definitely has a touch of that same narrative arrogance. How did you decide that? “The Witch Elm” is the only one of your books thus far not to be narrated by a detective, or not to take place from that point of view. How did you decide to flip that framework?

Well, for one thing, I wanted to move away from the Double Murder Squad a bit because I don’t ever want to get caught in the trap of writing the same book over and over. I think, if you’re writing in a specific procedural subgenre where it is A kills B, and the detective finds out through investigation whodunnit, it’s quite easy to fall into that trap. So I wanted to take a step back. I’d looked at the process of investigation from a detective’s viewpoint six times, and I kept thinking about the other viewpoints involved in that same investigation. You’ve got witnesses, you’ve got victims, you’ve got suspects, you’ve got perpetrators, and all of them have to see that investigation entirely differently. But, for all those other people, it’s a totally different thing. It’s this force that just barrels into your life, turns everything upside down. You have no idea where you stand: Are you a witness? Are you a suspect? What are you? You have no idea what the detectives are doing. You do you have no idea where it’s going to go, how much destruction it’s going to cause, where it’s going to stop. I thought all of those viewpoints deserved a look, as well, deserved a voice, too, and at different points in the book Toby’s all of those. He’s victim, witness, suspect, perpetrator—and, to an extent, detective, as well—so he kind of covers all the bases. I wanted to try out those different viewpoints.

This novel is quite capacious, and a lot of critics have noticed this. To me, that’s a good thing, by the way.

There’s a lot of it, I know. [Laughs.]

You do this in a lot of your books—in all of your books. But in this one in particular there’s a lot of time spent with your character where nothing seems to be happening from the perspective of figuring out who did the crime, or even what what the crime is. What kind of purpose does that serve for you? Another way to put it is, you’re often referred to as a literary crime writer, which is—I don’t know how you take that term, if it’s flattering or condescending or what, but I think people mean the writing is beautiful, that there’s this kind of exquisite characterization. What do you make of that “literary” side of things?

It’s hard, because I think the boundaries in fiction are breaking down all the time, which is a great thing. They bleed over from what used to be considered, This is what literary fiction should be like. This is what crime fiction to be should be like. More and more, there’s a lot of crossover. For me, I don’t know what I’m writing. I’m just writing this book, and the the core story arc is not the murder and the solution. The core story arc is Toby. Toby is going from this golden boy and his happy life to somebody who’s had that shattered, and what he does about it. How will he put the pieces back together? Will he be able to? Where will this crisis take him? That’s the story line. It’s going to be frustrating for some people because, if you’re coming to the book expecting a straight-up crime novel that abides by the genre conventions in which, yeah, the core of the book is the murder investigation, then you are going to be going, about a hundred pages in, Where’s my murder? Where’s this investigation? So I can see where, if there’s a clash between the expectations and the actual book, that always gets frustrating. But I like the fact that those expectations are no longer the be-all and end-all. For more and more crime writers, you don’t have to stick to the conventions. You can use them as a starting point rather than a finishing point.

There are two mysteries in “In the Woods.” There’s the mystery of what happened to Rob when he was a child: he was one of those three children you originally imagined who go into the woods, and only one comes out. That one is him, and he has no memory of what happened. And then there’s the actual murder that he’s trying to solve, which takes place in a similar wood. I won’t say which, of course, but we find out the answer to one of those mysteries and not both. Do you know what happened in the other mystery? Is that something in your mind, or are you just leaving it open for yourself, as well?

No. I know, more or less. I don’t know every specific, but I know in general what happened. But there was no way, with integrity, to work it into the book, so I kind of went, O.K., there are going to be some readers who aren’t happy, and fair enough. I can see why, but I’m going to have to stick with the one that makes it as good a book as possible, keep my fingers crossed that there are enough people who think like me.

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On Friday morning, Donald Trump said, on Twitter, “Serious discussions are taking place between House and Senate leadership on meaningful Background Checks. I have also been speaking to the NRA, and others, so that their very strong views can be fully represented and respected.” In a second tweet, Trump added, “I am the biggest Second Amendment person there is, but we all must work together for the good and safety of our Country. Common sense things can be done that are good for everyone!”

Trump isn’t the only Republican talking up the possibility of expanding the current system of background checks for gun purchases. For months now, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, has been sitting on a universal-background-checks bill that passed the House of Representatives. During a radio interview in his home state of Kentucky, on Thursday, McConnell rejected Democratic demands for an immediate recall of the Senate from its summer recess. However, McConnell also said that the issue of background checks would be “front and center” when Congress reassembles on its regular schedule, in September. “The President called me this morning about this,” McConnell added. “He’s anxious to get an outcome, and so am I.”

We have been here before, of course. Early last year, after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, Trump called for universal background checks and raising the age limit for purchasing rifles. Shortly after having dinner at the White House with the leaders of the N.R.A., however, he abandoned these proposals, citing a lack of political support. This humiliating retreat demonstrated that Trump, despite his popularity with Republican voters, wasn’t strong enough, or determined enough, to break the N.R.A.’s veto over gun policy.

In recent days, commentators and Republican political strategists have offered a number of reasons that things may be different now. For starters, opinion polls show overwhelming public support for enhanced gun-control measures, including the elimination of loopholes in the current background-check system, which doesn’t apply to unlicensed gun sellers. In a Morning Consult/Politico poll taken this week, eighty per cent of respondents, including seventy-four per cent of Republicans and people who lean Republican, said that they strongly support requiring background checks on all gun sales. (The figures are even higher if you include people who said that they “somewhat support” universal checks.) “I think we’ve reached a tipping point,” Scott Jennings, a political adviser to McConnell, told the Times. “The polling clearly supports that notion, and as long as the president is going to be for something, I think there will be momentum for it within the party.”

The N.R.A. has consistently opposed strengthening background checks, and almost all other gun-control proposals, of course. In a statement issued on Thursday, Wayne LaPierre, the longtime head of the organization, declined to comment on his “private conversations with President Trump,” but he did say that “the NRA opposes any legislation that unfairly infringes upon the rights of law-abiding citizens. The inconvenient truth is this: the proposals being discussed by many would not have prevented the horrific tragedies in El Paso and Dayton.”

This response was eminently predictable, but the N.R.A. is facing a dual challenge to its grip on Capitol Hill. Internally, the organization is in turmoil, with supporters and board members questioning the lavish spending being done by LaPierre and other senior executives. After the Parkland shooting, according to a report in the Washington Post, LaPierre tried to get the N.R.A. to buy him and his family a 6.5-million-dollar, ten-thousand-square-foot mansion in a Dallas gated community, because he needed somewhere more secure to live. Last week, three members of the N.R.A.’s board of directors quit. In a resignation letter, they said, “Our confidence in the NRA’s leadership has been shattered.”

Externally, the N.R.A. is also under fire. The office of the New York attorney general is investigating the organization’s tax-exempt status. And, in many parts of the country, a reënergized and well-financed gun-control lobby has challenged it politically, and even outspent it during the 2018 midterms. “I’ve never seen them weaker,” John Feinblatt, the president of the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, told USA Today. “I think they have been very much sidelined.”

That sounds encouraging. Still, as Trump decamps for the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, there are plenty of reasons to remain skeptical, beginning with the calendar. The usual pattern, which the N.R.A. and other opponents of gun control rely on, is for the political momentum behind gun-control efforts to ebb as memories of the latest atrocity recede. Congress isn’t due back until September 9th, which is a full month away.

Also, it is Trump we are dealing with, and he is notoriously averse to crossing rural and suburban gun owners, who make up a key part of his base. Even if the polls currently show overwhelming support for expanded background checks and other measures, Trump will be sensitive to a possible backlash, especially if the opposition includes some of his right-wing media outriders, such as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

Furthermore, there is a possibility that Trump will try to tie any gun-control measures he endorses to immigration-law changes that Democrats oppose, such as lengthening the period for which asylum-seeking families can be detained after crossing the border. In a tweet on Monday, Trump suggested “marrying” immigration and gun control. On Thursday, the Times reported that he has told some advisers that he “would like a political concession in exchange” for acting on gun control. If he insists on this linkage, the chances of getting any legislation passed are slim.

Finally, Trump has already passed on the most urgent need in the issue: a restoration of the Clinton-era ban on assault weapons, which mass shooters used, in the span of a week, in El Paso, Texas; Dayton, Ohio; and Gilroy, California. During a back-and-forth with reporters on Wednesday, Trump said that “there is no political appetite for it from the standpoint of the legislature.” He made this statement even though, for years, polls have consistently shown that most Americans favor restoring the ban on assault weapons, which a G.O.P.-controlled Congress allowed to expire, in 2004. In this week’s Morning Consult/Politico poll, seventy per cent of all voters, and fifty-four per cent of Republicans, expressed “strong support” or “some support” for prohibiting such weapons. Among Republican women, the support level was at sixty-four per cent.

The public is ahead of the political system. Tightening up background checks would help prevent criminals from purchasing guns. Expanding so-called red-flag laws would help families and judges to disarm some people who are clearly disturbed. But many of the individuals who have carried out gun massacres bought their weapons legally, or got somebody else to purchase them. Often, family members and friends don’t identify shooters as serious threats prior to their rampages. (On Friday, the Times reported that the mother of the shooter in El Paso did express concerns to police about her twenty-one-year-old son purchasing an AK-47 assault rifle, but she declined to identify herself or him.) As other countries have demonstrated, by far the most effective way to keep assault weapons out of the hands of these individuals is to ban their sale in the first place. That isn’t going to happen.