Customer Reviews

Bandbox: A Novel

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

What dizzy fun! Thomas Mallon takes his usual historic care with a period, but lets the 1920s fizz and roar with humor and spot-on observations. Bandbox (as in "he looks just like he stepped out of a . . .") is a fashion magazine for men. Only recently B'box, as the press calls it, was a fading rag for the lavender crowd, but then editor Jehosephat Harris (known as Joe or 'Phat) added top fiction, adventure, crime writing and romantic tips for single men and this new style mag has turned the New York magazine scene on its ear. Joe Harris was at the top of the world until his second-in-command was lured away by Conde Nast to start rival men's magazine Cutaway. Jimmy Gordon is now trying anything he can to ruin Bandbox, and it looks like he's doing a good job.

The Bandbox staff is a combination of the ambitious (who may be spying for Gordon), the disillusioned, the creative, the artistic, and those on the wagon, and those off the wagon. The women on staff, reveling in the opportunities the new decade has offered them, are probably the most competent, but even they are as wacky as all get out There's a lot of drinking, making payoffs to cops, avoiding gangsters, writing snappy prose, and trading quips. Bandbox must be saved, but with every strategy backfiring in their faces, it looks as though our beloved staffers may be seeking jobs at places like Catholic World before long.

Mallon builds plenty of momentum and enough suspense to keep you guessing at the fate of the magazine and its dedicated staff up until the very end. The unforced dialogue has the true ring of the 20's and is fun to follow. The female characters especially are believable and fun, filled with the heady excitement from the new freedom women enjoyed after the first World War. Some of the male characters take longer to gel and it is necessary to keep checking back to see who they are.

This is frisky, charming book where the madcap 20s roar with fun. As silent movie star Marion Davies later observed with a sigh, "What times we had."-----Candace Siegle

A truly delightful read. Fast-paced, charmingly populated, romantic as all get out, and very, very funny. The real question is: how will they possibly come up with a collection of actors and actresses this vivid and this funny when they inevitably make the film?

Bandbox is one of those novels that reinforces my belief that I was born about 50 years too late. It captures the New York of the Roaring 20's and the helter skelter world of magazine publishing in a way that is both funny and engrossing. Thomas Mallon may not be writing on a par with Fitzgerald or others original to the period (who can?) but he is definitely at the top of his game and it's no shame to be the Triple-A champ.

The plot fits into several genre, the most prominent being a madcap screwball and the other being somewhat of a minor mystery - will the competition succeed in shutting down Bandbox? Mallon makes deft use of every character, even though there are easily more than a dozen to keep track of, and each fits very, very neatly into the plot. That's incredibly hard to pull off and if the book wobbles a little bit in some sections, it makes up for it in others.

Mallon captures the romance of the city and the era vividly, from the socio-political events to the popular culture to the love affair that writers had and continue to have with New York. Even though we know via history's events what's coming around the corner for these characters, we care about them enough to want them to avoid the hard times and root for them against the "bad guys".

Jehosaphat "Joe" Harris is the editor of Bandbox and he seems like a combination of Harvey Weinstein and Boss Tweed. He's fighting to save his magazine from the upstart Cutaway, edited by his onetime protege Jimmy Gordon. Jimmy, who will stop at nothing to bury Bandbox, appears to have the upper hand. The suspense as to who will emerge victorious is an excellent attention-grabber as situations and circumstances get more and more out of control.

The funny thing about the book is that some of the characters and situations are cliches of the 20's, but we're so used to them they don't feel like cliches. Mallon manipulates our perceptions and stereotypes to do his job for him, which is a very clever move. It's also interesting that in reading it I couldn't help but think of what kind of film it would make. Some of the parts are ridiculously easy to cast in the imagination. Alec Baldwin, for example, is the epitome of Jimmy Gordon.

One flaw, and I've noticed this in other novels that are similar to this one, is that there is so much going on in some instances the author foreshadows what's coming a little too blatantly which takes some of the fun away from the big moments when they do occur. This is a minor criticism - it's like watching a movie when you've seen all the cliches and you know one is coming. It's probably not going to detract from the overall experience but you remember it for not being on the same level as the rest of the material.

The book reads very smoothly - probably a good two days at most - and leaves you wanting more. Thomas Mallon is going on my list of authors whose other work I am interested in reading.

Thomas Mallon's new novel begins with an epigrammatic definition of its title: Referring neither to music nor to boxing, a bandbox is, he quotes Webster's, "a neat box of pasteboard or thin wood, usually cylindrical, for holding light articles of attire." It's just the sort of ephemeral arcane that Mallon, as one of our most imaginative and inventive historical novelists, specializes in. With books like HENRY AND CLARA and DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, set respectively in the 1940s and the 1860s, he not only immerses the reader in a precisely rendered version of a long-vanished era --- of which details like the term "bandbox" are the essential building blocks --- he also tells these complex stories with a dramatic flourish seemingly defined by that particular time and place.

With BANDBOX, Mallon tackles the 1920s, and the book's vertiginous velocity, keystone-kop commotions and clever contrivances certainly capture the roar of that decade. The title refers to a men's fashion magazine headed by Jehoshaphat "Joe" Harris, an aging editor who once famously turned the formerly failing rag around in one business quarter. Now he faces crazed competition from his former protégé, Jimmy Gordon, who has jumped ship to Cutaway, a prestigious Condé Nast upstart.

A boisterous brouhaha brews around this bitter brawl between big cheeses as Mallon deploys the entire Bandbox masthead --- from the managing editor all the way down to the lowly fact-checker --- to shadow stories in New York and California, to rake muck on rivals and to try to stay one, no, two steps ahead of the competition.

In Harris's inner circle are Norman Spilkes, the rag's skittish managing editor, and David Fine, the sadsack wine-and-dine columnist with the unlimited expense account. Stuart Newman, the cake eater who writes the bachelor life column and beds all the new girls, is fighting alcohol and his curious attraction to Nan O'Grady, the bug-eyed Betty copy editor. Her assistant, Allen Case, is a real case: he's an ardent animal lover who won't eat meat and resents Gardiner Arinopoulos's use of pythons and koalas in photo shoots with head model Waldo Lindstrom, "an omnisexual cocaine addict" with a hushed-up criminal record.

At least Nan doesn't work in the fact-checking department with Chip Brzezinski, a real Palooka who's hoping to secure a place on the Cutaway masthead by spying for Jimmy Gordon. But he's loyal to his boss, the Countess Daisy DiDonna, a social butterfly who's looking to settle down with the right man --- "right" meaning one who has money, prestige and power.

Covering the lowly vaudeville circuit is Aloysius "Cuddles" Houlihan, a veritable cautionary tale against burnout. He used to be a real up-and-comer, but he's all washed up these days. The only thing he can muster now is a pathetically moony look at his secretary, a choice piece of calico named Becky Walter, who craves the frenzied life of real writers but is held back by a wet-blanket boyfriend studying Scottish Chaucerians.

It's a considerably colossal cast of characters, but as they scheme and scam to save their jobs, Mallon juggles them all with vaudevillian aplomb. They play off each other dynamically, moving the plot half by their own wayward motivations and half by sheer happenstance: miscues, misunderstandings, miscalculations, miscommunications, misleads and misdeeds.

In fact, BANDBOX is often so much fun to read that it feels frothy and frivolous. This tone, however, is more a nod to the hubbub of Prohibition-era New York; this tonic has a strong bite. Mallon slyly suggests that the titular magazine is a fictional precursor to present-day lad mags like Maxim, Stuff and FHM that explode with scantily clad starlets and salacious sex columns. This implication is revealing: our cravings for love and sex, glamour and adoration, power and prestige, drugs and alcohol --- among so many other vices --- are nothing new, but rather conditions of simply being human. In this and many other ways, Mallon fashions the past to comment subtly but meaningfully on the present and, as with his previous novels, he does so with style and flair to spare.

--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner

I selected this book because I love this era. While this book does not fall into the category of classic literature, it does succeed in its intended purpose: to create a fun story, replete with interesting characters (caracatures though they are) and an interesting plot. It reads like an old black and white film, where actors/actresses drop great one-liners. The author's tongue-and-cheek efforts do not go to waste. This book is a great one to discuss with friends. I definitely recommend it, but go into it with expectations of entertainment, not lofty, eloquent prose.

Along with a love for New York and a boisterous appreciation of the Roaring Twenties, Mallon mines his experience as a former editor at GQ to bring us a hilarious and delightful tale of love, cutthroat competition, and headlong excess at the modern men's magazine.

"Bandbox," a stylish emblem of the Jazz Age, was nearly moribund when editor Jehosophat "Joe" Harris took the helm five years earlier. But now disaster looms again. Harris' trusted protégé, Jimmy Gordon, has defected to start a rival magazine. Not content with poaching ideas and writers, Gordon has resorted to treachery to squash his old mentor.

"Harris was sixty years old and, in truth, as much a throwback to the age of McKinley as the old `Bandbox' had been. But in order to sustain his reanimating magic, he had to keep current with all the flat chests and blues singers and tennis champions driving this frantic new age into which he'd outlived himself."

Harris, despite these sober reflections, thrives on the pace and glory. And even as he sighs over his special olive oil - a cruet of Scotch, this being Prohibition - a loyal staff writer is preparing a return volley in the latest skirmish. Arranging for a blackmail-quality composite photo (a marvel of the modern age) to counter Gordon's all-too-real shot of Leopold and Loeb reading "Bandbox" in their cell, Becky (former secretary to the lovesick editor "Cuddles" Houlihan), jumps at the chance to help.

But it's only a stopgap and as the magazine spirals into a whirl of calamity, the entire staff is caught up in the maelstrom of periodical war, separating the heroes from the traitors and cowards.

Among them is an alliterating, hard-boiled, mystery novelist who profiles criminals; the tee totaling handsome man-about-town columnist with an unquenchable thirst; a painfully shy copy-editor with a soft spot for animals and a gift for mimicry; the Countess, a man-collecting researcher who chooses a bent judge to settle down with; and a simile-ridden young writer with a ruthless agreeability. The women, equally eccentric, but less prone to the foibles of alcohol overindulgence, glory in their new independence.

Mallon's plot, involving a kidnapping and a race to deadline, encompasses organized crime, bootleggers and crooked cops, a leisurely dash to Hollywood in railway luxury, the latest in technology, a disastrous meeting with President Coolidge, a couple of romances and lots of nightlife. The cycle of the monthly magazine, with its frenetic pace, constant scramble for new ideas and ingenious cooperation, provides a sturdy, if fluid, structure. And the witty, literate, exuberant prose conveys an age of energy and excess much like our own. Mallon ("Henry and Clara," "Dewey Defeats Truman") has outdone himself.

After 70-odd years of writers trying to adapt the cinematic screwball comedy to the page, Mallon has finally done it. With pitch perfect prose, and a hint of a Robert Altman ensemble, the book hits on all cylinders.

That said, few books can live up to that estimation, though I feel that this one has. Results vary as to what Preston Sturges means to you.

Mr. Mallon may have a few anachronisms here and there (did they really say "chatting up" in 1928?) but he captures the spirit of the Twenties spot on. The novel is plotted like a screwball comedy, part The Front Page, part His Gal Friday and part F. Scott dancing in the Plaza Fountain.All the plot lines, so disconnected at the beginning, come together like finally woven wire by the climax.

Mr. Mallon has always been a genius at historical fiction and I particularly liked his two tragic Victorian romances. There is romance here, but mostly he is out to capture an era and he succeeds brilliantly at this.

I picked up this book from a discount bin in a bookstore on the boardwalk after I had accidentally left the books I had intended to read at home. I love the spirit of the 1920s, so I expected to enjoy the book at least a little, but I was very surprised. Just reviewing this book (which I read last year) makes me want to read it by the pool all over again. A serious drama it isn't, but it is fanciful and funny and most definitely worth the time.

I had such high hopes for this novel. I expected it to be a frothy, fizzy romp through a Manhattan magazine publishing empire during Prohibition. I wanted quips and Algonquin Table repartee. It just wasn't there. It was like flat champagne in a styrofoam cup.

For starters, there are too many characters, and they just aren't differentiated enough. I was never able to tell Betty and Becky apart. Add Daisy, and I just couldn't tell who was who among the female characters. There are a lot more male characters, so it was even harder to tell them apart. People drink. People backstab. People slack. A vegan tries to help animals. A Mid-West guy comes to Manhattan to make it big in the world. A mobster has a judge in his back pocket. These people just don't do interesting things. Sometimes, celebrities pass by. Vaudeville is dying. Sound is coming to movies. Famous names are dropped like snowflakes in a blizzard. This didn't even have the depth of a cartoon. A trip to Hollywood didn't help. The author should have deleted half of his characters and made the remaining ones more memorable.