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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In the Real World, August 16, 2001
This review is from: In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing (Hardcover)
Thomas Mallon is a former academic who got out because he could not abide how theory was choking literature. He became a distinguished novelist and critic, and this is first collection of essays on fiction, fact, and the relationship between them. He takes what might be called the Tom Wolfe side of the argument; that is, fiction is much better when it is about *something* besides the author's delicate inner feelings. Mallon is a witty, highly readable writer who is something of a rarity among New York-based critics--he's not automatically close-minded about politics. He praises Ward Just's Washington D.C. novels. He celebrates Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full." H.L. Mencken is found amusing but ultimately too self-aborbed, bitter, and anti-Semitic. Garry Wills is scorned for his simplistic political correctness about John Wayne. Don DeLillo's "Underworld" is called a masterpiece. Robert Stone's "Damascus Gate" is a "big, good book." There is a great consideration of works set in New Orleans, "The Big Uneasy." He celebrates Gore Vidal ("when the writing is this good, who cares about politics?"--my own feelings exactly.) He writes an appreciative piece about readers who write him letters (hope he feels the same way after the deluge of correspondence it is sure to get him.) There's a brilliant evaluation of Edmund Morris' "Dutch", which acknowledges the folly of that author's fictionalizations while acclaiming his basic insights on Ronald Reagan; it's the most balanced judgement I've read about that flawed but important book. He concludes with several fine essays about historical fiction : why write it, why read it, what is the author's duty to the facts. Perhaps his most perceptive cooments are about Norman Mailer's "Oswald's Tale." Mailer writes that we are reluctant to accept Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin of JFK because of the existential absurdity of such a insignificant figure being responsible for such earth-shattering consequences. Mallon falls back on the concept of religious faith: the concept of the "absurd", he writes is problematic because "it's a small, secular notion. Who knows what greater, untragic mystery may lie behind it, one explaining why the enormities happening here for no apparent reason may, in a place so distant it's hardly our affair, mean something after all?" A splendid collection.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
More smart than lovable, March 4, 2001
This review is from: In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing (Hardcover)
Thomas Mallon is smart, has common sense, and demands that you sit up and pay attention to him. He is a fast talker, too. These pieces appeared in monthly popular magazines, where likely he was the resident curmudgeon/ intellectual - albeit with a deadline. As he explains, he spent enough time in academia, "stuffing myself like a Christmas goose (Dickens) from the groaning board of books on the prescribed reading list" to earn a doctorate in twentieth-century British literature and teach for awhile (at Vassar) before moving "up" and out, into a job as a writer and mainstream critic. Mallon loves language's usefulness - sometimes as weaponry - and revels in his ability to use it well. There are lots of smart bits, arcana and literary and cultural trivia. He does his research, and then lays it all out for the reader. He loves proper nouns, too. Sometimes there are as many as twenty on a page. I actually wished for an index to somehow gather, at book's end, the many people, places, book titles, and other index-worthy things in this collection. He sometimes goes for the jugular. (Dos Passos' "unpunctuated Joycean singsong") He can be mean and lacking in the sort of tact that (for example) an undergraduate might require - in order to ever write again. It's not appealing, for example, when he savages David Guterson -not only his first novel, but his wholly extraliterary views on a variety of other things. Mallon can turn a phrase, but sometimes it would have been better not to. In other places this long-knives approach is just what you want. Regarding Mencken's reprehensible political views, during the 1930's, Mallon writes, "These are less the genteel barbarities of another age that the eternal chant of the crazy who's just boarded the subway car." On the other hand, when Mallon approves, he says so. ("In 'The Ice Age' Margaret Drabble surveys England like a sociologist in a helicopter, a sort of digital George Eliot.") In these pieces he is brainy, unforgiving, and approves, unfortunately, of comparatively few things. Good reading, but in measured doses.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A dynamite collection., January 5, 2008
This review is from: In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing (Hardcover)
This book was a delight. I had read two of Mallon's books - "Stolen Words" (on plagiarism) and "A Book of One's Own" (people and their diaries) - quite some time ago, and found them both charming and fascinating. So maybe the charm of these essays shouldn't have been a surprise. But I was bowled over, both by the breadth and depth of Mallon's coverage. Not to engage in hagiography, but he comes close to my notion of a perfect reviewer. In many instances his evaluations are a more eloquent expression of my own thoughts about a particular book or author. And in those cases where our evaluations were different, his views are expressed with a persuasive clarity that stimulates me to go back to the work in question and see what I might have missed. He's smart, erudite, witty, someone who has obviously read widely, with catholic tastes and a broad-ranging curiosity. But, refreshingly, his criticism comes squarely from the point of view of someone who obviously wants to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. Which is not to say that he pulls his punches, but there is none of the besetting sin that afflicts most critics - the cruel putdown whose primary aim is to remind you of the critic's own smartness. Nor does he ever give the sense of targeting someone solely because of their success.
A good illustration of what I mean is his essay "Snow Falling on Readers", which examines the work of David Guterson. It is characteristic of Mallon's approach that, to understand the success of Guterson's biggest hit, he takes it on himself to read and discuss the author's entire work. Having done so, he ultimately finds it wanting. Characteristically, his summation is gentle, but damning nonetheless:
"I must confess that the real mystery to me is not what happened to Carl Heine aboard his fishing boat but just what on earth the PEN/Faulkner jurors were thinking - and beyond that, what all the local book-group readers who have made this No.1 can be seeing. A majority of these group readers - a discerning constituency who do much to keep literary fiction alive in America - are women, and it's the female characters in Guterson's books who are flimsy to the point of mere functionality, projections of male desire and indecision."
Compared with the mean-spirited hatchet job on Guterson that appears in "A Reader's Manifesto", which cannot escape giving the impression of being motivated by resentment at another's success, Mallon's evaluation reads like genuine literary criticism.
Which is not to say that all is high-minded and serious. Elsewhere in the same essay he makes the following throwaway, but devastatingly on-point, remark:
"I have been against homeschooling ever since that family-taught girl won the national spelling bee a few years back. This child who became such a point of pride to homeschooling parents couldn't stop shouting and jumping around and crowing about her moment of onstage accomplishment. I didn't care if she could spell 'arrhythmia' backwards; this unsocialized kid needed Miss Crabtree to put her in the corner."
Essays I particularly enjoyed were those on the David Leavitt-Stephen Spender lawsuit, on Howard Norman (whose 'The Bird Artist' I have always considered the antidote to the appalling 'Shipping News'), on Will Self, on Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full". The essays on letters from his readers, on obituaries, on the ups and downs of the 'author book tour', and on the challenges of writing historical fiction are equally fascinating.
But what clinched things, and what earned this book its fifth star is the essay "Enough about Me", which expresses his civilized but eloquent antipathy to the "emergence of memoir as a hot new publishing commodity". Someone who mirrors my own thoughts on the matter, and can express them far more eloquently than I could. What's not to love?
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