CANR
WORK TITLE: UP WITH THE SUN
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PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.thomasmallon.com
CITY: Washington
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 314
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PERSONAL
Born November 2, 1951, in Glen Cove, NY; son of Arthur Vincent (a salesperson) and Caroline Mallon.
EDUCATION:Brown University, B.A., 1973; Harvard University, M.A., 1974, Ph.D., 1978.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, began as assistant professor, became associate professor, then part-time lecturer, 1979-91; Gentlemen’s Quarterly, literary editor, 1991-95, writer at large, 1995-2000; George Washington University, Washington, DC, professor of English, former Creative Writing Program director. Rockefeller Foundation fellow, 1986-87; served on National Council on the Humanities, 2002-05; National Endowment for the Humanities, deputy chair, 2005-06. Also teaches writing at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, VT.
MEMBER:American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
AWARDS:Ingram Merrill Award, 1994; Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2011; citation for excellence, National Book Critics Circle, for book reviews; Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships.
POLITICS: Libertarian Republican.WRITINGS
Author of “Doubting Thomas,” a column in Gentleman’s Quarterly. Contributor of articles and reviews to literature journals, newspapers, and national magazines, including American Spectator, American Scholar, Atlantic, Civilization, Harper’s, New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
Thomas Mallon is “one of our finer novelists writing about politics (especially those of the 19th century) and science,” according to Frederick Busch in the New York Times Book Review. Mallon has won acclaim for his historical novels, as well as for a body of nonfiction that explores various aspects of the writing process and various styles of self-expression. According to John Updike in the New Yorker, Mallon “has found forms expressive of his modern disquiet and given his furtive, ominous themes grandeur. He has shown himself to be … one of the most interesting American novelists at work.” In similar vein, Yale Review contributor Michael Malone observed: “A novelist like Thomas Mallon is an old-fashioned pleasure. Although Mallon is one of those fin-de-siecle storytellers finding form and content in the past, the result is a wonderful new fiction. … With a novelist’s craft Mallon puts … facts at the service of imaginative invention.”
Educated at Brown and Harvard Universities, Mallon was searching for a teaching position in the late 1970s when he met biographer Phyllis Rose at Wesleyan University. Rose was intrigued by a writing project Mallon had planned and helped him find a publisher for it. The result was A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries, a nonfiction survey of diary writing through the ages. Los Angeles Times contributor Richard Eder assessed that Mallon, “who has read hundreds of diaries, has written a marvelous book about them. It is a basket full of good things, and some of the best are his own.” He added that Mallon “has sat in libraries listening to famous and obscure voices. Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Dostoevsky, of course; and also a London spinster who spent her life in a boarding house, and a bed-ridden Boston patrician whose diary runs 30,000 pages. Here we are, they told him. Here they are, he tells us.” Eder and other reviewers found pleasure in the broad scope of Mallon’s book, noting that he gives as much deference to the unknown, the poor, and the lowly, as he does to the famous, the rich, and the noble.
In her New Yorker assessment, Naomi Bliven described A Book of One’s Own as “inclusive … but not a bit long-winded. It is learned but never pedantic. It is also charming, diverting, and exceptionally intelligent. The book is literary criticism, yet it is something more—a knowing, sympathetic, but not soppy commentary on humanity. … By bringing together so many diverse people at their most candid. … Mallon offers us a glimpse of human possibility we could get no other way.” In the opinion of New York Times Book Review contributor and poet Brad Leithauser, Mallon “lets the diaries speak for themselves,” with each chapter of the work devoted to a specific type of diarist, like chroniclers, travelers, creators, confessors, and so forth. To Leithauser, “the book proves winsome and ingratiating. … Some of the book’s most affecting passages come from diaries of pioneer women whose lives were ‘unremarkable in the sense of not’ being surprising, given their surroundings. But what surroundings!”
Arts and Sciences
Mallon’s first novel, Arts and Sciences, is, according to Edward Guereschi’s Newsday review, “the type of revenge comedy every disenchanted graduate student vows to write once he has passed from the cave into the sunlight.” This is a coming-of-age novel about the awkward, youthful Artie as he pursues his graduate degree in literature from Harvard University. Artie’s difficult first weeks push him close to a nervous breakdown; indeed, he has the impulse to throw people into oncoming traffic, destroy rare books from the university library, and the like. Georgia Jones-Davis observed in the Los Angeles Times Book Review: “Imagine if Keats had somehow re-materialized in the fall of 1973 as a … graduate student in English at Harvard. That’s partly what Thomas Mallon is up to” in Arts and Sciences. Jones-Davis added that Artie, “a Keats worshiper, really is a Keats clone—a 113-pound mass of quivering, nervous energy and sensibility.” Noted Roger Davis Friedman in the Chicago Tribune: “Into all of this comes Angela Downing, the 28-year-old blonde English divorcee who wins Artie’s heart through her knowledge of Greek [since Artie fears failing this subject foremost]. … Artie and Angela’s romance is far-fetched but more often than not entertaining in a smirky way. Angela is all the things Artie is not: spoiled, rich, unbearably witty, and purposefully dumb. One might call her an intellectual coquette.”
According to Jones-Davis, at the end of the academic year “Artie finds himself standing a little taller,” while Angela “is exhibiting signs of emotional wear and tear. This is all Sturm-und-Drang in a teacup stuff. … Arts and Sciences is a sweet, frothy story that tries to illustrate, as Keats put it, ‘how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul.’” Although some reviewers considered the novel slight and merely good for a few laughs, Guereschi believed it “shows its seams with bravado, charm and tenderhearted wit. … This is a skillful fictional debut.” USA Today contributor David Guy observed that Mallon “is a deft writer with a light touch and the sense to let a small subject remain small. He has produced a novel that seems perfectly suited to its theme, its humor shot through with wisdom.”
Stolen Words
Mallon followed Arts and Sciences with Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism. The book explores several examples of the perpetrators of plagiarism and the victims—or those who thought themselves victims. He covers disputes over materials ranging from scholarly books to television series, his focus a period extending from the sixteenth century to the 1980s.
In a New York Times review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that Stolen Words “remains specific and detailed yet manages to cover so much ground and blow away so much of the fog surrounding plagiarism.” New York Times Book Review contributor Walter Kendrick cited Mallon for sometimes providing excessive and unnecessary information, but nevertheless complimented him for producing “a beguiling portrait of the plagiarist … as an oddly plaintive psychopath.” Kendrick concluded: “The subject is dismal, but Stolen Words seldom fails to make it lively, engrossing and provocative.”
Aurora 7
Mallon’s second novel, Aurora 7, focuses on events encountered by a variety of people on May 24, 1962, the day astronaut Scott Carpenter performed the dangerous feat of orbiting the earth three times. A young boy, Gregory Noonan—who is fascinated by Carpenter’s mission—vanishes from his school. His parents must deal with this and other pressures—his father with business troubles, his mother with the difficulties of living up to the early 1960s ideal of domesticity. The book also provides a look at many other characters against a background loaded with period touches, including numerous references to the popular culture of the time.
Washington Post reviewer Marianne Gingher cited Aurora 7 for historical accuracy. “Mallon got every detail right,” the reviewer commented. “You’re back there in 1962, practically innocent again. You’re part of history.” Beyond this, Gingher wrote, Mallon also has created a rich universe of characters, and the reader cannot help being interested in their fates. The result, she said, is a novel that is “vast with insight, charming and provocative.” A New Yorker contributor suggested that Mallon has utilized his “talent for scrupulous historical research” in the service of an engaging story, making Aurora 7 “a gift-wrapped time capsule.”
Rockets and Rodeos and Other American Spectacles
Mallon’s 1993 book of essays, Rockets and Rodeos and Other American Spectacles, covers topics as diverse as former U.S. vice president Dan Quayle, the Sundance Film Festival, and the vigil before an execution at the San Quentin penitentiary.
In a review in USA Today, Stephen Goodwin wrote that the book is full of “precise, detailed and vivid reporting.” Rockets and Rodeos and Other American Spectacles, he continued, has “no grand vision to unveil” but contains numerous small revelations that “are more revealing than any full-blown, formal portrait.”
Henry and Clara
Mallon moved from essays on twentieth-century America to a novel of nineteenth-century America for his third work of fiction. Henry and Clara is a fictional portrait of Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, the couple who sat in the theater box with President and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln the night that Lincoln was fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth. Mallon originally intended to write a straight historical treatment of the couple, but finding the available material to be inadequate, he turned their story into a novel. “Mallon retraced the rough trajectory of Henry and Clara’s courtship and marriage, stopping at a point where the facts threatened to corset his narrative and his psychological speculation,” explained John Blades in the Chicago Tribune. He managed to do this, Blades noted, without trivializing history, unlike some writers of historical fiction.
In Mallon’s account, Henry and Clara’s lives are blighted by their presence at the assassination, but they encounter other difficulties as well. Brought up as stepbrother and stepsister in a wealthy family in upstate New York, they encounter parental opposition to their love affair. Henry is moody and temperamental even as a boy; these aspects of his character become more pronounced after his experiences as a soldier in the Civil War and the night at Ford’s Theatre, where he suffers a near-fatal knife wound at the hands of Booth. He also must endure questions about his conduct that night—about whether he could have saved the president.
Henry and Clara brought Mallon special notice for his historical research, his storytelling facility, and the meshing of these two factors. “The period details are generously supplied, but they rarely … detract from the central erotic and psychological drama of the loving couple,” Updike wrote in the New Yorker. “Perhaps one should have attempted a historical novel of one’s own” to appreciate Mallon’s ability, the reviewer added. Washington Post Book World contributor George Garrett commented that “the fabric of the story is magically seamless. … Scene by scene the powerful story is superbly told.” Publishers Weekly named Henry and Clara one of the best books of 1994.
Dewey Defeats Truman
Mallon once again stepped back into history for his novel Dewey Defeats Truman. The story unfolds in presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey’s hometown of Owosso, Michigan, during the summer in which the heavily favored Dewey campaigned against Harry Truman for the presidency. Beguiled by the “certainty” of Dewey’s election, the residents of Owosso make preparations for an onslaught of tourists and the reflected glory of their claims to their famous native son. Several subplots advance the narrative as well. In one, a young would-be writer named Anne Macmurray must choose between suitors: a well-meaning union organizer and a wealthy, arrogant Republican. In another, an elderly resident named Horace Sinclair offers opposition to the tourist trappings because they will interfere with the village’s secrets from another era. Citing Dewey Defeats Truman for its “compelling resonance,” Michael Malone reported in the Yale Review that the novel “is about Owosso’s people—politicians, merchants, courting couples, husbands and wives, widows and widowers, mothers and sons, teenage lovers, neighbors, friends, enemies, all living in Dewey’s hometown—and about how the coming election changes, or fails to change, their private lives.”
“Like one of Shakespeare’s summery comedies, [ Dewey Defeats Truman ] is about love’s madness,” wrote Jay Parini in the New York Times Book Review. “But it’s also about the complex negotiations that take place continually between public events and private lives. In exploring this theme, Mr. Mallon always uses his research cleverly, and the novel effortlessly summons the feel of a bygone era.” Parini concluded that the book “is a fine novel, one that snared me in its blithe madness. … Mr. Mallon has fashioned a lovely meditation on the interplay between past and present in the invention of public and private selves.” Malone commented that Dewey Defeats Truman “takes its own, contemporary place in a distinguished line of American small-town novels while very consciously honoring its predecessors in that tradition…. Thomas Mallon has that imaginative stamina to keep chasing the past down the tracks, to climb aboard and pull us in with him. Dewey Defeats Truman is a sharp, sweet, beautifully nuanced re-creation of a time in America when small-town neighbors squabbled and gossiped and cared about each other’s well-being. … Their world feels far away from the cults and cynicism of our fin de siecle, and worth remembering.”
Two Moons
Mallon returns to the nineteenth century for his novel Two Moons, a more somber meditation on science, mortality, and political power. At the center of the story is a love affair between a Civil War widow, Cynthia May, and a younger astronomer, Hugh Allison, whose dreams go beyond the mere charting of stars. Cynthia and Hugh work together at the United States Naval Observatory, paradoxically located in the swampy Foggy Bottom section of Washington, DC. With the discovery of two moons in orbit around Mars, they hope to receive funding for a better facility—to be located beyond the reach of the mosquito population of Foggy Bottom. Their work draws the attention of Republican powerbroker Roscoe Conkling, whose attempts to help Hugh are motivated not by an interest in science but by an attraction to Cynthia.
Busch noted in the New York Times Book Review that “the arena in which Mallon does his darkest, most gripping work is not that of the solar system but of Washington’s spoils system, the means by which powerful men like Conkling seek to prevail over others. From underscoring the bureaucratic stupidity that consigns the Naval Observatory to the mists of Foggy Bottom … to interlacing the erotic events of the novel with Congressional maneuvering, Mallon rewards the reader with wicked humor and deep insight.” Busch concluded: “This is a novel that abounds in rewards.”
Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy
In Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, Mallon looks anew at the assassination of the thirty-fifth president of the United States from the perspective of Ruth Paine, a young Quaker homemaker who provided to Marina Oswald and her child a place to stay while Lee Harvey looked for employment. Facing an unhappy marriage, Paine opened her home to Marina in exchange for lessons in Russian, and assisted Lee Harvey in finding work at the Texas School Book Depository. Historians of Kennedy’s assassination have debated Paine’s role in the tragedy; some view her as an innocent, naive bystander who was used by the Oswalds, while others see her as a conspirator in the murder, perhaps even a Communist sympathizer or intelligence operative.
Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy allows interested readers to learn more about Paine’s version of the events, many of which were shared with the Warren Commission, though a Kirkus Reviews critic noted that “Mallon unearths a few genuine revelations” in his account. Describing Mellon as a “stimulating and versatile writer,” Donna Seaman reported in Booklist that the author “judiciously, meticulously, and increasingly dramatically reconstructs the entire unnerving scenario,” forcing readers to reexamine their opinions about the assassination. “While not a heavy-hitting historical tome,” suggested a Publishers Weekly contributor, Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy “may introduce some fresh air on the vast storehouse of Kennedy works.”
Bandbox
Mallon returned to fiction with Bandbox, which throws readers into the magazine publishing world of New York City in the 1920s. Set during the flamboyant Jazz Age, just before the onset of the Great Depression, Bandbox follows the battles of Jehoshaphat Harris, the successful editor of the men’s magazine Bandbox, against his former protege, Jimmy Gordon, editor of an upstart competitor, Cutaway. Publicity stunts, Mafia kidnappings, office romances, accusations of plagiarism, and generous amounts of liquor abound in a comedy of errors, pitting magazine against magazine in a fight for readership supremacy.
The novel’s “defining energies are created by the raffish characters whom Mallon deftly sets into motion and conflict,” wrote Bruce Allen in a Hollywood Reporter article. “Strongly plotted and laced with witty wordplay,” observed Seaman in Booklist, “this tale of ambition, betrayal, and love is pure joy.” A Kirkus Reviews critic thought Bandbox offers readers “a wonderful ride, and a quantum leap beyond Mallon’s earlier fiction.” According to a Publishers Weekly contributor, “Mallon has never before employed his wit and humor to such good effect.”
Fellow Travelers
The novel Fellow Travelers is set in Washington, DC, during the 1950s. In the U.S. Congress, the House Committee on Un-American Activities is operating at full power, enabling Senator Joseph McCarthy to investigate suspected Communists and homosexuals alike. Tim Laughlin, the gay protagonist of the novel, is a recent college graduate who has been hired as a member of the Senate staff. Tim becomes involved with a State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, and the two struggle to keep their affair secret in the hostile political climate. In an interview posted on the Littoral Web site, Mallon explained why Fellow Travelers stands apart from his previous fiction: “My novels had often contained a lot of politics, but homosexuality hadn’t before this one been more than a leitmotif.” Discussing his inspiration for the story, Mallon said: “Fuller and Laughlin aren’t based on any particular historical figures. Both contain bits and pieces of people I’ve known in my own life, which makes them like the characters one finds being created by just about any novelist of the ‘non-historical’ sort.” He added: “In this regard, though, one thing in particular interested me about Laughlin. When I started to make notes on him, the first thing I put down was ‘Date of birth: November 2, 1931’—exactly twenty years earlier than mine. I realized that in some ways I was going to be writing about what my own life might have been like had I been born two decades earlier.”
Mallon, who lives openly as a gay man, further commented on the autobiographical nature of the novel. He told Bookslut Web site interviewer Paul Morton: “As much as anything I wanted to write about the ’50s, I didn’t necessarily want to write about homosexuality. I didn’t want to write an autobiographical book. I wanted to write about that period. But these things battened onto the book as I started it. So he’s the character most like me, though I’m not as sweet as he is. Nobody really is. If they are, God help them.” Mallon went on to tell Morton: “I do remember moments when I was writing this book when my emotions were engaged in a direct way that I hadn’t experienced in fiction before and I remember enjoying it. I remember having a sense that this was something I hadn’t tapped into before. It was probably good for me, good for the book.” He added: “I had emotional experiences writing other novels. I remember crying over the last page in Two Moons, but I was really crying over my creations. But this was different. I do remember a couple of times writing this book, doing scenes that were based on my own experiences and though they were refracted a bit, I would want to push the novel away. ‘I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to deal with that right now.’”
Critics, it seems, found that Mallon’s personal detail enhanced the novel. Michael Upchurch, writing for the Seattle Times, stated that “ Fellow Travelers rivals ‘Moons’ in ambition and complexity.” He added that “the copious detail … reveals as much as it obscures. Mallon is especially good at bringing to life the decade’s manners, taboos, technological wonders … and medical wisdom.” In addition, Upchurch commented that “Mallon, with recurring phrases and images, makes a music of their inequality that gives the book its structure, its heart and, by its last pages, an oddly wrenching serenity.” The novel presents a “rich historical stew of pop and political culture,” observed St. Louis Post-Dispatch contributor Harper Barnes. The story “is possessed of a pervasive, poetic melancholy, and Mallon writes beautifully and revealingly about the love between the two men, a love that in the 1950s still could not speak its name,” Barnes concluded. Although Boston Globe contributor Roland Merullo called the book “an unsatisfying mix of the political and the personal,” he nevertheless stated: “All through the story, which winds as lazily and often as pleasantly as a river in summer, I wondered if I’d feel differently about the lovers if one of them was a woman. But a writer of Mallon’s depth and abilities forces us beyond relatively superficial distinctions like gender and sexuality and down into the soul.”
In a Publishers Weekly interview, Mallon said that he enjoys writing about “people who are in some ways connected to the accidents of history. They are going to be acted upon by events, and in some ways I do think that is probably one more very big metaphor for the human condition: we are all bystanders to the plan. I do think there is some graspable divine truth that is out there, and it’s what governs us, and it is beyond our control. In that sense, the books may all be about the same thing.” Mallon added: “I think the main thing that has led me to write historical fiction is that it is such a relief from the self. It is like getting out of the house: there are times when it is absolutely necessary, and I think I would go mad if I tried to make fiction straight out of my own life.”
Yours Ever
Mallon’s adds a complement to his 1984 work A Book of One’s Own, about diaries and those who write them, with his 2009 title, Yours Ever: People and Their Letters, which performs a similar service for the epistolary mode. Here the author provides an overview of personal correspondence that ranges in time from ancient Persia to contemporary society. Interestingly, Mallon does not complain about e-mail as a form of communication; instead, he argues that it will actually resuscitate the art of letter writing. All sorts of communication forms count as correspondence in this volume, including telegrams, suicide notes, and memos. Mallon organizes the letters under categories such as “War,” “Love,” “Complaint,” and “Absence,” and into these categories introduces the thoughts, insights, and perceptions of a host of letter writers, including writers, politicians, and social reformers. There are gathered a wide range of voices, from Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill to the author V.S. Naipaul, and from William Faulkner to Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. The comments included do not always put the letter writer in the best light. For example, the racist comments of Faulkner are included along with Naipaul’s misogynist thoughts. Mallon also presents compulsively readable gossip: the opinions of acerbic H.L. Mencken on Wallace Simpson, for example, and the thoughts of intellectual Hannah Arendt on writer Vladimir Nabokov. Nor does Mallon ignore the less lofty, including advice letters from Ann Landers along with a similar letter of advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson to his daughter. There are also lesser-known voices here, including the literary critic Francis Matthiessen, who writes of creating life and love with another man, and the deaf English seamstress who attempts to win work with a tailor. “It’s to Mallon’s credit that he is attuned to the drama of these seemingly undramatic lives—and to the grim irony that letter writing today thrives most in extremis, among the prisoners and refugees who have been deprived of electronic communication,” noted the novelist Louis Bayard in the Wilson Quarterly.
Library Journal writer Nedra Crowe-Evers found this an “engaging if slightly disjointed expose of the inner musings of some of the world’s best thinkers.” Bayard had a higher assessment, terming the collection a “richly entertaining overview.” Similarly, New York Times Book Review contributor Stacy Schiff called the book an “astute, exhilarating tour of the mailbag,” while Choice reviewer T.P. Riggio thought that “Mallon’s fine-tuned prose makes his musings on the art of letter writing a reader’s delight.” Further praise for Yours Ever came from a Publishers Weekly contributor who labeled it a “smart, witty and lively account,” and from Booklist writer Carol Haggas, who dubbed it an “eloquent tribute to an endangered form of communication.”
Watergate
Mallon returned to historical fiction with Watergate, a “veritable opera buffa” distillation of the presidential scandal that rocked the nation in the early 1970s, according to Library Journal reviewer David Keymer. Mallon tells the tale in a novel with comic overtones, featuring many of the familiar historical characters from the actual Watergate time, but focusing primarily on six main characters: Fred LaRue, who was a Republican operative; H. Howard Hunt, the ex-spy and Nixon surrogate; Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a sharp-tongued society matron in her nineties; Rose Wood, Nixon’s ever loyal secretary; and of course President Richard Nixon himself and his wife Pat. Speaking with New York Times Arts Beat Blog contributor John Williams, Mallon remarked on the inspiration for this novel: “I’d have to say that Nixon feels like the public figure who most dominated my life—from the time I went to fourth grade wearing a Nixon-Lodge button in the fall of 1960, through my college years, which overlapped with Kent State, Cambodia, the China trip and all the rest. That I live across the street from the Watergate complex in Washington no doubt also had a lot to do with my getting around to this book.” Mallon further described his reading of Nixon’s character to Williams, describing the president as a “fundamentally shy, even gentle man who was repeatedly undone by the way he made a false god of toughness—tough guys and tough behavior.”
Mallon’s novel takes the reader through the main happenings in the Watergate imbroglio, from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices all the way through Nixon’s eventual disgrace and resignation. The story is told in the alternating viewpoints of the six main characters.
Keymer found this novel a “sure winner.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted of the work: “While billed as a novel, this book reads more like a documentary of a fascinating yet unlamented time.” Booklist reviewer Seaman offered higher praise, noting that Mallon’s “political fluency and unstinting empathy … transform the Watergate debacle into a universal tragicomedy of ludicrous errors and malignant crimes, epic hubris and sorrow.” Similarly, a New Yorker writer felt that the author “persuasively teases out the psychological drama of a story with a foregone conclusion.”
Finale
In 2015 Mallon published Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years. Mallon takes the historical novel framework to the 1980s in Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Many of the top Washington power brokers and insiders make an appearance as Reagan’s presidency unravels as a result of his onset of Alzheimer’s.
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Janet Maslin observed that the novel “transports the reader back to a time before scandals were named or reputations were frozen in time. The Reagan who has come to personify strength, patriotism and American exceptionalism is not the one in this book. Instead, Mr. Mallon emphasizes the man’s power to baffle even those closest to him. The book is full of efforts to fathom him. It finds that nobody, not even Nancy, really can.” Also reviewing the novel in the New York Times Book Review, Robert Draper insisted that “Mallon’s portrayal of the first lady is humane, thoroughly convincing and counts as one of the book’s triumphs.” Draper pointed out that “the novel’s one flaw lies in Mallon’s sentimental treatment of his close friend, Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011. … His ability to get the better of every situation may or may not have been true in real life. But in this world of fictionally textured reality, he’s something of a caricature, the only hitch in an otherwise galloping narrative.”
In a review in the A.V. Club Web site, Ryan Vlastelica noted of the era that “Mallon captures that uncertain tenor of the times while portraying the complex drama of high-level politics with real clarity and energy. His take on W. can’t come soon enough.” Reviewing the novel in Washington Post Book World, Connie Schultz remarked: “We may not know Ronald Reagan any better by the end, but we may be tempted to think we know a whole lot more about many others. The challenge after reading this book is to remind ourselves never to recount the tales between its pages as true.” Writing in Christian Science Monitor, Erik Spanberg insisted that “what makes Mallon’s novels so much fun is the author’s blend of historical exactitude with imagined reactions and machinations. Many of those machinations play out in the plausible guise of fictional secondary players.”
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Mallon concludes his loose trilogy, consisting of Watergate in 2012 and Finale in 2015, with Landfall in 2018, set during the tumultuous second George W. Bush administration that faced double disasters—the endless Iraq War and the destructive Hurricane Katrina. Fictional characters Ross Weatherall, a director in the National Endowment of the Arts and Humanities, and Allie O’Connor, a civilian lawyer with the National Security Council, navigate self-serving and obstinate real-life cabinet officials. Weatherall, a staunch Bush supporter, is updating a 1938 Works Progress Administration guidebook on New Orleans, and O’Connor, who doesn’t believe the U.S. should pull out of Iraq, works with manipulative Donald Rumsfeld. Following the disastrously inadequate response to Katrina, Weatherall and O’Connor, who once had a romantic liaison when they were teenagers, begin to change their perceptions.
Mallon populates Landfall with eager-to-please Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, acerbic former First Lady Barbara Bush, philandering John Edwards, formidable former Texas governor Ann Richards, as well as world leaders Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin. A Kirkus Reviews contributor praised the detailed, darkly funny, and informative book, adding: “the fact that Ross and Allie change their views based on experiences on the ground makes a refreshing—and one suspects deliberate—contrast with the dug-in positions of today’s political partisans.” In Booklist, Sarah Johnson commented: “Mallon’s latest fictional portrayal of the American political scene is impressively detailed and enticingly readable.”
In Mallon’s fictionalized Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, he offers a portrait of Ruth Paine, the real-life woman who in 1963 offered shelter and assistance to Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina. A Quaker, Paine kindly offered her help to those in need. She even helped Lee get work at the Texas School Book Depository and let him store his belongings, including his infamous rifle, in her garage. After Kenney’s assassination, Paine was viewed as either an unwitting do-gooder or a co-conspirator. Mallon follows her well-intentioned life through to her testimony before the Warren Commission and highlights her resiliency in the face of betrayal. A writer in Publishers Weekly pointed out some awkward chronologies and tedious family histories, but nevertheless reported: “While not a heavy-hitting historical tome, this may introduce some fresh air on the vast storehouse of Kennedy works. Ruth Paine’s is ultimately a human story.”
Blending murder mystery, showbiz history, and unrequited queer romance, Mallon’s Up with the Sun chronicles the life of volatile actor Dick Kallman, who worked for Desilu studios in the 1950s and ‘60s and his sensational murder in 1980. Narrated by Kallman’s pianist and longtime friend Matt Liannetto, the novel follows Kallman’s rise to stardom, his manipulative and bombastic attitude, his work with Lucille Ball, Sophie Tucker, Judy Garland, and Johnny Carson, and his personal demons, presumably resulting from his suppressed sexuality and love for actor Kenneth Nelson. Liannetto was at a dinner party with Kallman and his partner Steven on the night the two were brutally murdered in 1980. Working with the police to identify a suspect, Liannetto begins a romance with police liaison Devin Arroyo. The novel simultaneous covers 30 tumultuous years of gay culture from the Kinsey Report to Stonewall to AIDS.
In Publishers Weekly a reviewer commented: “Peppering the juicy drama of Dick’s ambition and unrequited love with pop cultural references, …Mallon creates a fascinating, page-turning tale. Readers will be swept off their feet.” Nell Beram remarked online at Shelf Awareness: “The wonder of Mallon’s characterization is that, for all of Dick’s weaselly ways, he remains sympathetic—except when he crosses Lucille Ball.” However, a writer in Kirkus Reviews found the book disappointing, declaring: “The novel’s tone is generally sour and sometimes nasty. That may be why Dick’s unrequited love for Kenneth Nelson, clearly intended to be a poignant leitmotif, never rings wholly true.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Advocate, July 17, 2007, review of Fellow Travelers, p. 60.
American Prospect, September 23, 2012, Tom Carson, review of Watergate.
Biography, December 22, 2010, Stacy Schiff, review of Yours Ever: People and Their Letters.
Booklist, January 1, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing, 1978-2000, p. 901; January 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, p. 783; December 1, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of Bandbox, p. 645; April 15, 2007, Brad Hooper, review of Fellow Travelers, p. 34; October 15, 2009, Carol Haggas, review of Yours Ever, p. 17; November 15, 2011, Donna Seaman, review of Watergate, p. 23; January 1, 2019, Sarah Johnson, review of Landfall, p. 36.
Boston Globe, June 3, 2007, Roland Merullo, review of Fellow Travelers.
Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1988, Roger Davis Friedman, review of Arts and Sciences; October 10, 1994, John Blades, review of Henry and Clara.
Choice, June, 2010, T.P. Riggio, review of Yours Ever, p. 1914.
Christian Science Monitor, September 8, 2015, Erik Spanberg, review of Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years.
Commonweal, May 4, 2007, review of Fellow Travelers, p. 20.
Entertainment Weekly, January 9, 2004, Jennifer Reese, review of Bandbox, p. 84; April 27, 2007, Jennifer Reese, review of Fellow Travelers, p. 143.
Hollywood Reporter, April 12, 2004, Bruce Allen, review of Bandbox, p. 12.
International Herald Tribune, May 18, 2007, Michael Gorra, review of Fellow Travelers.
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2001, review of Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, p. 1598; November 1, 2003, review of Bandbox, p. 1291; March 1, 2007, review of Fellow Travelers, p. 189; November 15, 2011, review of Watergate; November 15, 2018, review of Landfall; January 1, 2023, review of Up with the Sun.
Library Journal, May 1, 2007, Lisa Rohrbaugh, review of Fellow Travelers, p. 72; October 15, 2009, Nedra Crowe-Evers, review of Yours Ever, p. 76; October 15, 2011, David Keymer, review of Watergate, p. 76.
Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1984, Richard Eder, review of A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 14, 1988, Georgia Jones-Davis, review of Arts and Sciences.
Marie Claire, May 1, 2007, review of Fellow Travelers, p. 126.
Metro Weekly, May 17, 2007, Will O’Bryan, author interview.
National Review, April 5, 2004, Terry Teachout, review of Bandbox, p. 56; February 22, 2010, Florence King, review of Yours Ever, p. 46; April 2, 2012, Lisa Schiffren, review of Watergate, p. 45; December 7, 2015, Steven F. Hayward, review of Finale, p. 46.
Newsday, February 14, 1988, Edward Guereschi, review of Arts and Sciences.
New Yorker, January 21, 1985, Naomi Bliven, review of A Book of One’s Own; March 11, 1991, review of Aurora 7, p. 92; September 5, 1994, John Updike, review of Henry and Clara, pp. 102-105; March 26, 2012, review of Watergate, p. 99.
New York Times, November 17, 1984, John Gross, review of A Book of One’s Own, pp. 14, 15; December 7, 1989, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism, p. C24; January 16, 1997, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Dewey Defeats Truman: A City of Empty Coffins and Lives.”
New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1985, Brad Leithauser, review of A Book of One’s Own, p. 29; March 13, 1988, Liz Rosenberg, review of Arts and Sciences, p. 23; October 29, 1989, Walter Kendrick, review of Stolen Words, p. 13; February 2, 1997, Jay Parini, “Everything Up to Date in 1948,” p. 13; March 5, 2000, Frederick Busch, “The Spacious Firmament on High”; January 4, 2004, Sven Birkerts, review of Bandbox; November 29, 2009, Stacy Schiff, review of Yours Ever, p. 13; March 4, 2012, Curtis Sittenfeld, review of Watergate, p. 11; September 16, 2015, Robert Draper, review of Finale; September 23, 2015, Janet Maslin, review of Finale.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 29, 2007, Bob Hoover, review of Fellow Travelers.
Publishers Weekly, January 20, 1997, Michael Coffey, “Thomas Mallon: Picturing History and Seeing Stars,” p. 380; January 1, 2001, review of In Fact, p. 85; November 26, 2001, review of Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, p. 51; November 10, 2003, review of Bandbox, p. 39; March 5, 2007, review of Fellow Travelers, p. 36; September 14, 2009, review of Yours Ever, p. 35; November 14, 2011, review of Watergate, p. 31; November 28, 2022, review of Up with the Sun, p. 25.
Seattle Times, March 27, 2009, Michael Upchurch, review of Fellow Travelers.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 20, 2007, Harper Barnes, review of Fellow Travelers.
St. Petersburg Times, May 13, 2007, Colette Bancroft, review of Fellow Travelers.
USA Today, March 4, 1988, David Guy, review of Arts and Sciences; February 24, 1993, Stephen Goodwin, review of Rockets and Rodeos and Other American Spectacles, p. 20.
Washington Post, February 17, 1991, Marianne Gingher, review of Aurora 7, p. 7.
Washington Post Book World, August 14, 1994, George Garrett, review of Henry and Clara, p. 5; May 6, 2007, David Leavitt, review of Fellow Travelers, p. 7; September 14, 2015, Connie Schultz, review of Finale.
Wilson Quarterly, December 22, 2010, Louis Bayard, review of Yours Ever, p. 94.
Yale Review, July, 1997, Michael Malone, “Fiction in Review,” p. 135.
ONLINE
A.V. Club, http://www.avclub.com/ (September 14, 2015), Ryan Vlastelica, review of Finale.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (March 27, 2009), Paul Morton, author interview.
George Washington University, Columbian College of Arts & Sciences Web site, http://departments.columbian.gwu.edu/ (September 23, 2012), “Thomas Mallon.”
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Web site, http://www.gf.org/ (September 23, 2012), “Thomas Mallon.”
Littoral, http://www.kwls.org/ (March 27, 2009), author interview.
Morning News Online, http://www.themorningnews.org/ (July 11, 2007), Robert Birnbaum, author interview.
New York Times Arts Beat Blog, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/ (February 22, 2012), John Williams, “Thomas Mallon on the Fact and Fiction of Watergate.”
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (January 2020), review of Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy.
Shelf Awareness, https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (December 15, 2022), Nell Beram, review of Up with the Sun.
Thomas Mallon Home Page, http://www.thomasmallon.com (June 7, 2016).*
Thomas Mallon
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Thomas Mallon
Mallon at the 2019 Texas Book Festival
Mallon at the 2019 Texas Book Festival
Born November 2, 1951 (age 71)
Glen Cove, New York
Nationality American
Alma mater Brown University,
Harvard University
Genre fiction
Notable awards Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award
Website
www.thomasmallon.com
Thomas Mallon (born November 2, 1951) is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author's crisp wit and interest in the "bystanders" to larger historical events.[1] He is the author of nine books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Finale, and most recently Landfall. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One's Own), letters (Yours Ever) and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine's Garage), as well as two volumes of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact).
He is a former literary editor of Gentleman's Quarterly, where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column in the 1990s, and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and other periodicals. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and served as Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2005 to 2006.
His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose style. He was elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.[2]
Contents
1 Early life and education
2 Writing career
3 Awards and nominations
4 Later life
5 See also
6 Bibliography
6.1 Books
6.2 Essays and reporting
6.3 Critical studies and reviews of Mallon's work
6.4 Interviews
7 References
8 External links
Early life and education
Thomas Vincent Mallon was born in Glen Cove, New York and grew up in Stewart Manor, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Arthur Mallon, was a salesman and his mother, Caroline, kept the home. Mallon graduated from Sewanhaka High School in 1969. He has often said that he had "the kind of happy childhood that is so damaging to a writer."[3]
Mallon went on to study English at Brown University, where he wrote his undergraduate honors thesis on American author Mary McCarthy. He credits McCarthy, with whom he later became friends, as the most enduring influence on his career as a writer.[4]
Mallon earned a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he wrote his dissertation on the English World War I poet Edmund Blunden. On sabbatical from Vassar College in 1982–1983, Mallon spent a year as a visiting scholar at St. Edmund's House (later College) at Cambridge University. It was here that he drafted most of A Book of One's Own, a work of nonfiction about diarists and diary-writing. The book's rather unexpected success earned Mallon tenure at Vassar College, where he taught English from 1979 to 1991.
Writing career
Thomas Mallon's writing style is characterized by wit, charm and a meticulous attention to detail and character development. His nonfiction often explores "fringe" genres—diaries, letters, plagiarism—just as his fiction frequently tells the stories of characters "on the fringes of big events."[5]
A Book of One's Own, an informal guide to the great diaries of literature, was published in 1984 and gave Mallon his first dose of critical acclaim. Richard Eder, writing in the Los Angeles Times (28 November 1984) called the book "an engaging meditation on the varied and irrepressible spirit of life that insists on preserving itself on paper." In A Book of One's Own, Mallon covers a wide range of diarists from Samuel Pepys to Anais Nin. He explained his enthusiasm for the genre by saying: "Writing books is too good an idea to be left to authors." The success of A Book of One's Own won Mallon a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1986.[6]
Mallon then began publishing fiction, a genre in which he'd informally dabbled throughout childhood and young adulthood. Mallon published his first novel, Arts and Sciences, in 1988 about Arthur Dunne, a 22-year-old Harvard graduate student in English. Soon after its publication, in 1989, Mallon released a second nonfiction book called Stolen Words: Forays Into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism.
Henry and Clara, published in 1994, established Mallon as a writer of historical fiction from that point forward. The novel traces the lives of Major Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, the young couple who accompanied Abraham Lincoln to Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. A story of star-crossed lovers intermingles with personal and political tragedies and spans the couple's first meeting in childhood to their eventual derangement.[7] Mallon's writing career took a dramatic turn when John Updike praised Henry and Clara in The New Yorker, calling Mallon "one of the most interesting American novelists at work."[8]
Historical fiction, Mallon has declared in interviews, is the genre in which he is most interested as a writer. "I think the main thing that has led me to write historical fiction is that it is a relief from the self," he explains.[9] American political history has been perhaps his main subject and interest; in 1994, he was the ghostwriter of former Vice President Dan Quayle's memoir, Standing Firm.[10]
After the publication of Henry and Clara, Mallon went on to write seven more works of historical fiction, including his most recent novels, Watergate (2012), Finale (2015), and Landfall (2019). Watergate, a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction,[11] is a retelling of the Watergate scandal from the perspective of seven characters, some familiar to the public memory, such as Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods, and some brought to light from the sidelines of the scandal, such as Fred LaRue.[12] Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years, one of the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2015, takes readers to the political gridiron of Washington in 1986; the wealthiest enclaves of southern California; and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where President Ronald Reagan engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev.[13] Readers of Finale find themselves in the shoes of many characters both central and peripheral to the Reagan presidency––from Nancy Reagan to Richard Nixon to actress Bette Davis.[14]
Landfall, Mallon's latest novel, takes place during the George W. Bush years against a backdrop of political catastrophe: the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina, in particular. At the center of the narrative, though, is a love affair between two West Texans, Ross Weatherall and Allison O'Connor, whose destinies have been intertwined with Bush's for decades.
Awards and nominations
Phi Beta Kappa, 1972
Rockefeller Fellowship, 1986–87
Ingram Merrill Award (for outstanding work as a writer), 1994
Great Lakes Book Award for Fiction, 1998, for Dewey Defeats Truman
National Book Critics Circle Award (Nona Balakian Citation) for Excellence in Reviewing, 1998
Guggenheim Fellowship, 2000–2001
Dictionary of Literary Biography Award for Distinguished Criticism, 2002
Finalist for 2007 Lambda Literary Award for Fellow Travelers
American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style ($10,000 prize; conferred May 2011)
Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2012
Finalist, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (For Watergate, 2013)
Later life
Openly gay, Mallon currently lives with his longtime partner, William Bodenschatz, in Washington, DC, and is a professor emeritus of English at The George Washington University. He once described himself as a "supposed literary intellectual/homosexual/Republican."[15] During the 2016 election he was actively involved in "Scholars and Writers Against Trump,"[16] a group of disaffected conservatives.[17] He left the Republican Party in November 2016.
See also
List of historical novelists
Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (January 2015)
Thomas Mallon in 2009
Books
Nonfiction
Edmund Blunden. Boston: Twayne. 1983.
A book of one's own : people and their diaries. Ticknor & Fields. 1984.
Stolen words : forays into the origins and ravages of plagiarism. Ticknor & Fields. 1989.
Rockets and rodeos and other American spectacles. Diane Publishing Co. 1993.
In fact : essays on writers and writing. Pantheon. 2001.
Mrs. Paine's Garage and the murder of John F. Kennedy. Pantheon. 2002.
Yours ever : people and their letters. Pantheon. 2009.
Fiction
Arts and Sciences : A Seventies Seduction. Ticknor & Fields. 1988.
Aurora 7. Ticknor & Fields. 1991.
Henry and Clara. Ticknor & Fields. 1994.[18]
Dewey Defeats Truman. Pantheon. 1997.
Two Moons. Pantheon. 2000.
Bandbox. Pantheon. 2004.
Fellow Travelers. Pantheon. 2007.
Watergate : a novel. Pantheon. 2012.
Finale : a novel. Pantheon. 2015.
Landfall : a novel. Pantheon. 2019.
Essays and reporting
"Bookmarks: Mrs. Paine's Garage and the murder of John F. Kennedy". The Wall Street Journal. January 18, 2002.[19]
"Transfigured : how Muriel Spark rose to join the crème de la crème of British fiction". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 86 (8): 68–73. April 5, 2010.
"Wag the dog : the making of Richard Nixon". The Critics. A Critic at Large. The New Yorker. 88 (46): 68–74. February 4, 2013.
"Less said : a biographer speaks up for Calvin Coolidge". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 89 (4): 66–71. March 11, 2013.
"Restless realism : Mario Vargas Llosa's imagined lives". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 91 (4): 78–82. March 16, 2015.[20]
"Frenemies: The combative camaraderie of Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 91 (15): 68–72. June 1, 2015.
"Presumptive". The Critics. Life and Letters. The New Yorker. October 31, 2016.
“Jack Be Nimble: Trying to Remember JFK.” The Critics. Life and Letters. The New Yorker, May 22, 2017.
"The electric man : the rise and fall of Wendell Willkie". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 94 (28): 59–64. September 17, 2018.[21]
Critical studies and reviews of Mallon's work
Bliven, Naomi (January 21, 1985). "Quiddities". The New Yorker. Vol. 60, no. 49. pp. 92–93. Review of A Book of One's Own.
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (December 7, 1989). "Word thieves and what compels them". The New York Times. Review of Stolen words.
Gingher, Marianne (February 17, 1991). "Through space and time". The Washington Post. Review of Aurora 7.
Goodwin, Stephen (February 24, 1993). "Thomas Mallon's American Pie". USA Today: 20. Review of Rockets and rodeos and other American spectacles.
Updike, John (September 5, 1994). "Excellent humbug". The New Yorker. Vol. 70. pp. 102–105. Review of Henry and Clara.
Wood, James (December 31, 1996). "Those little-town blues". Slate. Review of Dewey defeats Truman.
Mitgang, Herbert (January 26, 1997). "Master of detail". Chicago Tribune. Review of Dewey defeats Truman.
Weber, Katharine (April 9, 2000). "Starry-eyed". The Washington Post. Review of Two Moons.
Pritchard, William H. (January 14, 2001). "The company he keeps". New York Times Book Review: 13. Review of In fact : essays on writers and writing.
Upchurch, Michael (January 20, 2002). "How history happens". Chicago Tribune. Review of Mrs. Paine's Garage and the murder of John F. Kennedy.
Gibbons, Kaye (February 8, 2004). "The '20s roar again with rollicking energy". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Review of Bandbox.
Smith, Wendy (April 29, 2007). "Opportunism knocks". Los Angeles Times Book Review. Review of Fellow Travelers.
Birns, Nicholas (2009). "Thomas Mallon". American Writers. Supplement (XIX): 131–47. Survey of Mallon’s career up to 2008.
Schiff, Stacy (November 29, 2009). "Please Mr. Postman". New York Times Book Review: 13. Review of Yours Ever.
Alabanese, Andrew Richard (November 30, 2009). "Man of letters". Publishers Weekly: 22–24.
Maslin, Janet (February 15, 2012). "Nixon and friends, stalked with literary license : 'Watergate,' a novel by Thomas Mallon". Books of the Times. The New York Times.
Andersen, Kurt (February 11, 2019). "A Comic Novel About the George W. Bush No One Knows". The New York Times. Review of Landfall.
Swaim, Barton (February 15, 2019). "‘Landfall’ Review: How It Really Never Happened." The Wall Street Journal. Review of Landfall.
Interviews
Daly, Gay (May 20, 1985). "In his own words". People.
Coffey, Michael (January 20, 1997). "Thomas Mallon : picturing history and seeing stars". Publishers Weekly: 380–381.
McGregor, Michael (December 2003). "An interview with novelist and critic Thomas Mallon". The Writer's Chronicle: 16–23.
Morton, Paul (August 2007). "An interview with Thomas Mallon". Bookslut.
Haskell, Arlo (February 9, 2008). "Plausible presence : a conversation with Thomas Mallon". Littoral : the blog of the Key West Literary Seminar.
Kauffman, Bill (June 2009). "Moonstruck : a chat with novelist Thomas Mallon". The American Enterprise: 41–43.
Smith, Evan (October 8, 2015). "Thomas Mallon." Overheard with Evan Smith.
Akst, Daniel (March 1, 2019). "Fictionalizing History, With Republicans at Center Stage". The Wall Street Journal.
THOMAS MALLON's eleven books of fiction include Henry and Clara, Fellow Travelers, Watergate (a Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award) and the forthcoming Up With the Sun. He has also written volumes of nonfiction about plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One's Own), letters (Yours Ever) and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine's Garage), as well as two books of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact). His work appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and other publications. He received his Ph. D. in English and American Literature from Harvard University and taught for a number of years at Vassar College. His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for distinguished prose style. He has been literary editor of Gentlemen's Quarterly and deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is Professor Emeritus of English at The George Washington University and lives in Washington, D. C.
Up with the Sun
Thomas Mallon. Knopf, $30 (352p) ISBN 978-1-5247-4819-7
Mallon's sparkling latest (after Watergate) draws inspiration from real-life actor Dick Kallman's career on Broadway and television and his 1980 murder. A pianist named Matt Liannetto, who first met Dick while working on the 195 1 Broadway musical Seventeen, provides the narration. Matt had dinner at Dick's in 1980, the night Dick and his partner, Steven, were killed during a botched robbery. Alternating chapters describe the actor's career. The "aggressively ingratiating" Dick opens for comic singer Sophie Tucker (who gets in a few good lines); works with Lucille Ball, who has the manipulative and bombastic Dick's number; and stars in the touring company for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which leads to his ill-fated TV series, Hank. After Seventeen star Kenneth Nelson rejects Dick's advances, Dick's decade-long obsession with Kenneth drives the story. Meanwhile, Matt goes to identify a murder suspect in a "vocal lineup," where he meets and becomes romantically involved with Devin Arroyo, who works with the police. Mallon finds a natural sweetness in his depiction of Matt and Devin's relationship as the trial and its aftermath unfold--a nice contrast to Dick's unpleasant story. Peppering the juicy drama of Dick's ambition and unrequited love with pop cultural references, as well as cameos from Dyan Cannon and Kaye Ballard, Mallon creates a fascinating, page-turning tale. Readers will be swept off their feet. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
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"Up with the Sun." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 50, 28 Nov. 2022, pp. 25+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A730115656/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3cfb892d. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
Mallon, Thomas UP WITH THE SUN Knopf (Fiction None) $28.00 2, 7 ISBN: 9781524748197
The author of a smart, tart series of political novels--most recently Landfall (2019)--casts an equally well-informed, unromantic eye on the entertainment industry and its closeted gay denizens.
Once a moderately successful actor, then a shady antiques dealer, Dick Kallman is dead when the novel opens on Feb. 23, 1980. Narrator Matt Liannetto, a Broadway pianist and intermittent friend, recalls the strained dinner party Dick threw on the night of his murder, interrupted by the arrival of a supposed client who in retrospect is a glaring suspect. (Kallman's career and death are factual; the circumstances of his murder are bent to fictional use.) Matt then flashes back to 1951, when he was pianist for the musical Seventeen, Dick had a supporting role, and both were smitten by leading man Kenneth Nelson (among the many real-life show-biz figures who make appearances). Dick's crush proves to be a lifelong obsession as chapters alternate with mechanical regularity between the rise and fall of Dick's career and the grim aftermath of his death. The crime brings love to Matt in the person of much younger Devin Arroyo, a former hustler now working at the police precinct, and their sweet romance provides a welcome respite from Mallon's depressingly accurate portrayal of life on show business's striving fringes. From landing a promising spot in Lucille Ball's television empire, through decent gigs as the lead in Broadway touring companies, to a one-season television flop, Dick always finds that his embarrassingly obvious scheming ends up thwarting his naked ambition. He stops getting work by the 1970s, he admits to himself, "because nobody, at least nobody that knew him, liked him." Dick's personality is skin-crawlingly plausible, but that makes it hard to feel sorry for him, even as Mallon acidly limns the ridiculous games gay actors were forced to play--dates with "beards," fake engagements--in those pre-Stonewall days. The novel's tone is generally sour and sometimes nasty. That may be why Dick's unrequited love for Kenneth Nelson, clearly intended to be a poignant leitmotif, never rings wholly true.
Readable and intelligent, like all Mallon's work, but overall a disappointment.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Mallon, Thomas: UP WITH THE SUN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731562297/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=75a3c36e. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
Mallon, Thomas LANDFALL Pantheon (Adult Fiction) $28.95 2, 19 ISBN: 978-1-101-87106-5
Mallon extends his sharp-eyed fictional exegesis of real-life American politics (Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years, 2015, etc.) into George W. Bush's second term.
His imaginary protagonists are Ross Weatherall, director of a branch of the National Endowment of the Arts and Humanities (Mallon's make-believe mashup of the NEA and NEH), and Allie O'Connor, a National Security Council staffer hired by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to give the president her skeptical view of what Rumsfeld now considers the failing occupation of Iraq. Carefully controlled Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gamely supports staying the course, and several highly charged meetings show her and Rumsfeld maneuvering for position around their president's abruptly shifting moods. Bush is gently but unsparingly portrayed--"In his way," comments Henry Kissinger, "the sincerest man I've ever met....Which is to say...he's a disaster." As Allie grapples with the slow-moving disaster of Iraq, Ross is plunged into the immediate nightmare of Hurricane Katrina while working in New Orleans on an updated version of the old Works Progress Administration guidebook. His eyewitness view of the government's wholly inadequate response (limned in restrained but still appalling detail by Mallon) turns this once-ardent Bushie against the administration; at the same time, Allie has come to the reluctant conclusion that however ill-advised the invasion was, it would be morally wrong to abandon the Iraqis. Their conflicted relationship is not quite as interesting as Mallon's knowledgeable and diamond-hard portraits of actual Washington insiders across the political spectrum, from showboating John Edwards (Mallon's most acid character sketch) to tough-as-nails Barbara Bush (no sweet little old lady in pearls here). Nonetheless, the fact that Ross and Allie change their views based on experiences on the ground makes a refreshing--and one suspects deliberate--contrast with the dug-in positions of today's political partisans. A rueful 2013 epilogue reunites Ross with Bush, who has discovered through painting "a whole world of in-between."
Marvelously detailed, often darkly funny, as informative as it is entertaining. Mallon may well be the 21st century's Anthony Trollope.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Mallon, Thomas: LANDFALL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A561923265/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3afab2d. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
Landfall. By Thomas Mallon. Feb. 2019.496p. Pantheon, $29.95 (9781101871058).
The conclusion to a loose trilogy that includes Watergate (2012) and Finale (2015), Mallon's latest incisive, historically themed novel centers on George W. Bush's second term. It provides an insider's view of how his ambitious agenda gets derailed by the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina and the inept federal response to it. Mallon demonstrates great skill in animating a large cast of prominent personalities, with characterizations ranging from cheekily funny (the banter between Larry King and former Texas governor Ann Richards) to biting (the good-looking, self-interested John Edwards) to deeply empathetic. Readers will find some nods to today's political dramas; for instance, Brett Kavanaugh makes several appearances. Witty conversation ensues as scenes shift between meetings, speeches, elegant dinners, and other domestic and international gatherings, while the depiction of flooded New Orleans is starkly sobering. Against this anxious backdrop, Bush's moods swing from confidence to uncertainty, and two fictional characters, prickly NSC staffer Allison O'Connor and Ross Weatherall, a new federal administrator responsible for updating WPA guidebooks, interact with the real-life figures. Their viewpoints and romance are shaped by their opposing reactions to Bush's policies and their on-the-ground experiences. Mallon's lat est fictional portrayal of the American political scene is impressively detailed and enticingly readable.--Sarah Johnson
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
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Johnson, Sarah. "Landfall." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 9-10, 1 Jan. 2019, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A573093983/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3f76ab2b. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
Landfall
By Thomas Mallon
Pantheon
$29.95, 496 pages
9781101871058
eBook available
Political Fiction
Long before first lady Laura Bush mentions The Prime Minister, the fifth of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels, readers familiar with his sextet of political works will have detected the similarity between them and Landfall, Thomas Mallon's new book. Instead of Prime Minister Plantaganet Palliser and discussions of the Irish Land Tenant Bill, Mallon gives us the first two years of George W. Bush's second term and its challenges, self-inflicted and otherwise, from the Iraq War to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
The writing style is the same, however, with a huge cast of characters and long conversations about politics. Amid the real-life personages, Mallon has added two that are fictional: Ross Weatherall, a director of the merged National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, where he is updating a 1938 Works Progress Administration guidebook on New Orleans; and Allison O'Connor, a civilian lawyer whom Donald Rumsfeld brings to D.C. to work at the National Security Council as "an assistant to a special assistant to the president."
Ross and Allie haven't seen one another since a romantic evening after a 1978 campaign event in Texas, when Bush unsuccessfully ran for Congress. Decades later, when they reunite, Ross is a committed Bush supporter, while Allie questions the wisdom of the Iraq invasion. Their positions evolve, however, as Katrina and other events force them to recalibrate.
Throughout Landfall, Mallon shifts perspectives among many characters, most notably Condoleezza Rice, portrayed as a relentlessly ambitious person who feels that if Prince Charles "could inherit his one lifelong job, she could be appointed to all of hers." And he writes many scathing portraits of the era's figures, including Barbara Bush, who, when she and George H.W. Bush call on dying former Texas governor Ann Richards, wants nothing more than to hurry the visit along.
If Mallon tries too hard to cram in references to every major news story of the day, Landfall is still a well-researched view of the jealousies and back-room dealings of early 21st-century American politics.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 BookPage
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Magras, Michael. "Landfall." BookPage, Mar. 2019, pp. 19+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A574178562/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d86fdaeb. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
Landfall: A Novel
BY THOMAS MALLON
Pantheon, 496 pages
WITH HIS latest novel, Landfall, set during the second term of the George W. Bush administration, Thomas Mallon completes an unintentional trilogy in a literary subgenre he has made all his own: historical political fiction. Using Washington, D.C, as a canvas, Mallon ingeniously weaves his plots around actual events with a cast of characters comprising both the fictional and the real. In Watergate (2012), a brooding Richard Nixon seeks the counsel of Alice Roosevelt Long-worth. Finale (2015), set in the lead-up to the Reagan-Gorbachev Reykjavik summit, features Christopher Hitchens, Nancy Reagan, Pamela Harriman, and its main character, a fictitious aide on the National Security Council caught up amid the burgeoning Iran-Contra scandal. Both books were highly readable, especially for junkies of American political history.
In Landfall, Mallon's chief protagonist is Ross Weatherall, a conservative Texas academic appointed to a job compiling city heritage guides for a fictionalized amalgamation of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Mallon himself served as deputy chairman of the latter in the George W. Bush administration). Unhappily married with children, Weatherall is dispatched to New Orleans, where he rendezvouses with a young protegee of Donald Rumsfeld's, a staffer on the National Security Council named Allison Williams, the sort of hard-charging, career-driven female defense policymaker-cum-operative who has become ubiquitous in Washington over the past two decades. Over the course of the novel, their lives intertwine with that of Bush and are forever upended by the two unexpected cataclysms of his presidency: Katrina and the Iraq War.
Mallon is a talented storyteller, and with the benefit of hindsight that is the unique feature of the historical-political novel, interlaces fictional and real plotlines in a believable and engaging way. But the real pleasure in reading his novels is his treatment of actual personages. Mallon has such great material to work with--Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Barbara Bush, Ann Richards, Bob Dole (the latter two serving here as dueling talking heads on Larry King Live, where their on-and-off screen banter serves the role of Greek chorus)--that his novelized versions of real people invariably overshadow the fictitious characters.
For instance, it is hard to come up with a pithier description of the hapless Jeb Bush than the one Mallon devises from the perspective of his mother Barbara: "the son she admired more and loved less." Or this precis of the Cheney-Rumsfeld relationship, encapsulated in the vice president's "facial expression showing the way he and his long-ago patron managed to remain in strange, eternal agreement, even when they were actually at odds." Condi, meanwhile, longed for "41's calm, Pax-Americana world, where she had been a happy ingenue instead of a failing star." Rumsfeld, who, in the early months of the Afghan War displayed the demeanor of "a rejuvenated bantam rooster whose sparring sex appeal almost left Maureen Dowd susceptible," is, by the end of the novel, a tiresome figure whose stubborn presence must be overcome to implement the Iraq troop surge Mallon foreshadows.
A longtime denizen of the nation's capital, Mallon peppers his narrative with wry Washingtoniana, observing how the "important people down front" attending the president's State of the Union address "were now trapped, like first-class airline passengers unexpectedly ordered to exit through the rear door" after the speech concludes. The city's grandees "cordially loathe" one another. Driving to the Naval Observatory for his regular lunch with Cheney, Henry Kissinger observes the lone protestor outside the Vatican embassy who has stood there seemingly forever in protest of clerical sex abuse. Fred Kagan and Paul Wolfowitz make cameos.
Some novelists are renowned for their prose style, others for their gripping plots. Mallon is a master of dialogue, spinning lines for his characters that sound exactly like what you would expect them to say, only more so. "I didn't know unelected presidents got presidential libraries," Nancy Reagan remarks of her late husband's erstwhile rival, Gerald Ford. "Look around her neck and you'll find all the pearls of wisdom that didn't go to her son," Ann Richards quips of Barbara Bush. Presented with a predictably asinine argument about the Iraq War, Christopher Hitchens responds, "I'd ignore your point if you had one." Mallon is also adept at envisioning the inner thoughts of his characters. Describing an imagined Oval Office meeting between Hitchens and George W. Bush, the latter thinks to himself, "Here comes the Mother Teresa shit."
There are several more such laugh-out-loud moments in Landfall, but also ones of keen insight. Most observers of Bush trace his humor to a frat-boy immaturity; Mallon suggests its origins lie in family tragedy. "As always," Mallon writes of the 43rd president, "he was pleased when he got a laugh--a matter of the deepest satisfaction to him ever since he'd taken it upon himself, at the age of seven, to cheer up Mother, despairing over the death of his little sister in the hot-box of a house in Midland." Mallon has sympathy for his characters, a quality that enables him to avoid the easy caricature offered by smug political satirists. The one exception to this rule is John Edwards, contempt for whom oozes from every page on which he appears. Upon viewing aerial photographs of Edwards's massive new manse in North Carolina, Ann Richards observes that it 'looked like a combination of Tara and Jonestown."
Mallon's ultimate verdict on Bush is that he was essentially a decent man rocked by events and in over his head. In the president's feelings of personal responsibility to help save Ross and Allison's ill-fated romance, Mallon suggests an admirable, if quixotic, quality that characterized elements of his presidency. "If he could help to solve their problems, writ small in the ink of a double catastrophe, maybe that could lead him toward a solution for the catastrophes themselves," Mallon writes of the president's intervention in a domestic dispute while the ravages of Katrina and the Sunni uprising abound. The once-fashionable portrayal of Bush as an evil mastermind--which has not aged well with time--is here implied to be a stupid calumny, not only because Bush is a fundamentally good man, but because he lacked the capacity for anything so ornate. As a fictionalized commentary on the Bush administration, Landfall provides a fitting contrast to VICE, Adam McKay's cartoon-villain portrayal, which seems to have been made for the sort of person who faults Michael Moore for subtlety.
Mallon has completed this trilogy at an auspicious time. It is the sort of fiction that our current president has rendered obsolete, for the simple reason that we're now living it. In his novels, Mallon had to intuit the interior lives of his characters and their imagined dialogue behind closed doors. A diligent researcher, he thanks members of Bush's National Security Council in his acknowledgments and cites tomes penned by New York Times and Washington Post reporters. In the nearly four years since a certain reality-television-show mogul descended a shopping-mall escalator to announce his campaign for the presidency, the American public has been inundated with a constant stream of tweets, leaks, and jaw-dropping revelations about this singularly chaotic administration. Literally nothing is left to the imagination, the most vital gift a novelist possesses.
Reviewed by JAMES KIRCHICK
JAMES KIRCHICK is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. He is at work on a history of gay Washington, D.C.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
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Source Citation
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Kirchick, James. "A Real Presidency Imagined: Landfall: A Novel." Commentary, vol. 147, no. 4, Apr. 2019, pp. 53+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A582635448/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=727816e6. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
Landfall
By Thomas Mallon
Pantheon, 2019
landfall.jpg
It’s not merely to reprimand an ill-advised novel but also and mainly to celebrate simple responsible civics that reader encountering Thomas Mallon’s new book Landfall remember something the post-2016 world will be every day encouraging them to forget: George W. Bush was a terrible President of the United States. He started two wars designed to be eternal, he cluelessly botched his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, and he bumbled through his two terms steadfastly learning nothing, adapting to nothing, and listening to nothing. He was not an indelicate and rough-hewn cowboy stomping through a Byzantine world of backstabbing city-slicker politicians; he was a headstrong, inattentive idiot.
To readers of a certain age, all of this will go without saying; it’s only by comparison with the current Republican Presidential administration that the previous one can even begin to look borderline competent, much less relatable. But the obvious needs a bit of re-stating in light of Landfall, where George W. Bush is not so much terrible as he is an enfant terrible, a bossy, instinctive leader given to unpredictable flare-ups of heedless temper and staffed on all sides by ambitious aides always keeping one eye on their own political skins. On every level of the intentionality spectrum, the novel encourages readers not only to sympathize with Bush but, by extension, to exonerate him.
Mallon claims the book is the concluding volume in what began a trilogy of political novels about American administrations within living memory: first Watergate, then Finale (about Bush Senior and Ronald Reagan), and now Landfall. In this third book as in the first two, a prodigious amount of research congregates right beneath the chatty, fast-moving surface of the plot, which revolves around some of the major events of the Bush administration’s second term and hinges directly at its half-way point on the infamous hurricane that brought down the administration in the eyes of the day’s pundits.
The book bristles with cast. Mallon knew a great many of the newsmakers of the day, and he’s read up infinitely on all the others, and he’s determined to cram every last member of that cast into Landfall. His most effective device for doing this is also his most artificial: occasionally writing up the famed dinner parties held in the Wyoming by Christopher Hitchens and his wife and roving around the room in person to eavesdrop and name-drop on the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, John Edwards, John Bolton, Ann Richards, Bob Dole, Larry King, Michael Kinsley, and Donatella Versace. Faced with the admittedly daunting task of getting so many people to sound not only distinct but authentic, Mallon opts to have every last one of them sound tinny and out of character, and since he declines to fill his readers in on any of the details he knows so well, a pall of obscurity hangs over everything. At one point Kinsley is talking to Hitchens, for instance:
“He’s pre-trial,” replied Hitchens, who had made [former Vice President Cheney aide “Scooter”] Libby one of his quixotic causes. “He’s over at the Hudson Institute for the moment.”
“Thinking and tanking,” said Kinsley. “Well, at least he diverts you from David Irving.” The Hitch continued to champion the Holocaust-denying historian’s right to publish along with his release from jail on the European Continent.
Libby is scarcely mentioned again, nor is Irving, nor is any of this explained. If you know anything about David Irving being in jail over on “the European Continent,” you’ll smile at the mention. If you don’t, tough bananas. Likewise when Bush is thinking about the “judicial murder” complexities of the Terry Schiavo case:
He honestly believed that, like the death penalty, torture could save lives. But every so often he needed to talk it through, receive some assurance that he was correct. Laura wasn’t the right person for this: any talk of physical pain sent her mind straight back to the skidding and screech in that Midland intersection thirty-seven years ago; the sudden, sickening death of the guy in the car she hit. As soon as the thought would come to her, you’d see her eyes darken, as if a pair of black contact lenses had been put over her pupils. Until the memory clicked off she was just gone, her mind having been rushed to a secure location that nobody could find.
This is effectively written, but since it’s not helpfully written, since the average non-Beltway reader won’t have any idea what long-ago tragedy is being so artfully hinted, the passage might as well be in computer code. Every single one of those non-initiate readers will immediately respond, “What? Laura Bush killed somebody?” - and the question will rattle uselessly around the book. If you still have the minutiae of the period at your fingertips, you’ll nod knowingly. If not, then not.
And even being armed with that minutiae won’t help in the many, many cases where Mallon decides to depart from it and indulge in the exact same elevating and apologizing routine that made Finale and especially Watergate such infuriating books. Sometimes, people genuinely are as bad as history portrays them. Richard Nixon was one such person, and George W. Bush is another, not that you’d ever know it from absurd scenes like the one when Our Hero grows frustrated by a Cabinet meeting and says this:
The president threw his pencil onto a hassock. “You know, there used to be hog barns where we’re sitting. We knocked them down to build the house. I suspect the animals inside ‘em had more productive conversations. And were better behaved.”
Or the moment when Bush reflects on the fact that he and Tony Blair had ultimately made war on Saddam Hussein “for the simple, unspeakable reason that he was a bad guy.” In a note of very likely unintentional dark humor, the next line is: “But it had all gone so wrong, become so anguished.”
Yes indeed, it had all gone so wrong, become so anguished. No anguish and precious little wrong in Landfall, but readers can at least hope that the author’s comments about bringing a trilogy to a close are true. Seeing this kind of tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner nonsense doled out to first Nixon then Reagan and now Bush has been trying enough. If Mallon’s next book is called Wall, we’ll have an alternative trilogy on our hands.
—Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, the Washington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.
Shelf Awareness for Thursday, December 15, 2022
Book Review
Review: Up with the Sun
Up with the Sun by Thomas Mallon (Knopf, $28 hardcover, 352p., 9781524748197, February 7, 2023)
Novelist Thomas Mallon has mastered the art of fictionalizing the lives of historical figures: Richard Nixon in Watergate, Ronald Reagan in Finale and so on. Dick Kallman--an American actor turned antiques dealer who was murdered in 1980--may not have been a prominent historical figure, but in Up with the Sun, Mallon leans on the not-quite star's biography to tell a story every bit as revealing about American ambition as the author's previous efforts centered on political giants.
The novel's even-numbered chapters unspool like a mystery. They're narrated by Matt Liannetto, a native New Yorker who makes his living as a pianist for musicals; he met Dick in 1951, when they were working on the same show. As it happens, Matt was at a dinner party at Dick's Manhattan duplex the night before Dick and his live-in boyfriend were fatally shot in what seems to have been a robbery gone wrong. Suspects are nabbed--sketchy men that Dick welcomed into his home as the evening was wrapping up--and Matt testifies at the trial, where he can't help but notice that his cheap-looking tiepin, which Dick foisted on him at the tail end of the party, catches the interest of the defendants.
In Old Hollywood parlance, Up with the Sun has a cast of thousands. There are delectable walk-ons as well as fully dramatized scenes featuring both famous faces (Natalie Wood, Robert Osborne) and stars of lower wattage. In a recurring role is actress Carole Cook, a real-life contemporary of Dick, who may be speaking for the reader when she wants to know why Matt seems to be obsessed with a man who is, as she put it, "not terribly likable as murder victims go."
Dick's unlikability is on hilariously preening display in Up with the Sun's odd-numbered chapters; an omniscient narrator remarks that with Dick, "ambition stuck out like a cowlick or a horn, fatal to an audience's complete belief in almost any character he was playing." These chapters trace Dick's life as a well-born striver whose many attempts to set Hollywood afire, most promisingly with the doomed sitcom Hank (1965-66), ended in crushing disappointment refashioned into rage. In one scene, Dick accidentally-on-purpose smashes costar Dyan Cannon's finger for upstaging him during a performance. The wonder of Mallon's characterization is that, for all of Dick's weaselly ways, he remains sympathetic--except when he crosses Lucille Ball. Then he's pushing it. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Part mystery and part homage to showbiz also-rans, this sensational (in both senses) novel imagines the aftermath of real-life actor Dick Kallman's 1980 murder and the three decades that precede it.
MRS. PAINE'S GARAGE: And the Murder of John F. Kennedy
Thomas Mallon, . . Pantheon, $22 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-375-42117-4
In his fiction, Mallon (Henry and Clara, etc.) has looked at history's accidental tourists, ordinary citizens thrust by happenstance into the swirl of cataclysmic events. This time around, he turns a journalistic eye toward a central surviving figure in the Kennedy assassination. In 1963, Ruth Paine, now in her late 60s, was a recently separated housewife hoping to improve her Russian. As a result, she offered to shelter a Russian woman, Marina Oswald, her children while her husband, Lee Harvey, sought work. In the end, Paine, a committed Quaker, unwittingly provided Oswald a sniper's nest—she helped him find employment at the Texas School Book Depository—and storage space, her garage, for arguably the 20th-century's most infamous murder weapon. The views on her association with the Oswalds have run the gamut, from naïve do-gooder to CIA conspirator. Here we meet up with some old faces, seen now through Paine's eyes, such as Jim Garrison, the overzealous New Orleans district attorney determined to uncover a conspiracy. Mallon follows the strange trajectory of Paine's well-intentioned life, from her first meeting with the Oswalds to her voluminous testimony before the Warren Commission to her pursuit of an estranged Marina following the events. Mallon also generates a variety of delicious "what-if" scenarios and "small-world" coincidences. There are a few brambles to hack through at the outset, awkward chronological zigzags and family histories that are tedious in spots. But these patches are soon smoothed out. While not a heavy-hitting historical tome, this may introduce some fresh air on the vast storehouse of Kennedy works. Ruth Paine's is ultimately a human story, the tale of one woman living in America. (Jan. 7)