Fellow Travelers (Vintage) (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: congressional relations, New York, Miss Lightfoot, Hawkins Fuller (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McCarthy-era Washington, D.C., is as twisted and morally compromised as a noir Los Angeles in Mallon's latest, a wide-ranging examination of betrayal and clashing ideologies. The young ladies in the secretary pool are agog over dapper bureaucrat Hawkins Fuller, though his attentions covertly focus on newly minted Fordham graduate and good Catholic Tim Laughlin. Hawkins helps Tim land a job and, after feeling out the impressionable young man, makes a place in his bed for him. Mary Johnson, a friend to both closeted men, watches with rising alarm as Tim and Hawkins carry on their affair and Washington seethes in paranoia over Communists and "sexual deviation." Mary, meanwhile, succumbs to her own lustful yearnings and has an affair with a married businessman, leading to a predictable, though deftly played, quandary. The District's social milieu is solidly realized, with such period icons as Mary McGrory and Drew Pearson in evidence alongside political heavyweights—McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon and the like. Less convincing, however, is the on-again-off-again and largely one-sided relationship between Washington greenhorn Tim and cold, calculating careerist Hawkins. Mallon (Bandbox; Dewey Defeats Truman) offers an intricate, fluent and divergent perspective on a D.C. rife with backstabbing and power grabbing. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by David Leavitt

"The personal is political" -- one of the catchphrases of the gay liberation movement -- might serve as an epigraph to Thomas Mallon's exuberant new novel, Fellow Travelers. Reduced to its beams and studs (in both senses of the word), the novel is a love story. Hawkins Fuller is a handsome, Park Avenue WASP, and Tim Laughlin is a skittishly devout working-class Irish Catholic. They both work for the federal government in Washington. The time, however, is the mid-1950s, the heyday of Sen. Joe McCarthy and the moment when the State Department's initiative to purge its workforce of homosexual men and women was at its zenith. Not surprisingly, Hawk, who works for the State Department, and Tim, who is an assistant to Sen. Charles Potter, one of McCarthy's colleagues, soon find themselves caught up in a political maelstrom: "chained," as Mallon writes, "to the electrified cage of who had what on whom."

Mallon has made something of a specialty of the historical novel, and in particular the novel of American politics. (His other books include Dewey Defeats Truman and Henry and Clara.) He also lives in Washington, and his fondness for the city is evident throughout Fellow Travelers, which shuttles from senate offices to seedy gay bars. And though real people pop up from time to time -- Richard Nixon, Perle Mesta, Mary McGrory, a memorable Roy Cohn -- the focus remains on Mallon's imaginary protagonists.

Hawk is elusive, alluring and feckless. He wants everything: He wants to ensure that he doesn't lose his family's money, and he wants to have a good time, and he wants to keep his job, and he wants to get married, and he wants to be able to sleep with as many men as he feels like. One afternoon he casually picks up Tim, a naive Fordham graduate whose Catholic faith is matched by his faith in American democracy. Starved as much for sensation as affection, Tim falls instantly and hopelessly in love; he can't resist the admixture of "protectiveness, affection, distance, enforcement" that Hawk proffers.

Mallon integrates Hawk and Tim's story seamlessly into the larger drama of the McCarthy witch hunt, as in the memorable scene when Hawk, under interrogation to determine if he's homosexual, is asked to read aloud from Of Human Bondage. ("Was the interrogator expected to detect a tribal affinity between author and reader?" he wonders.) Mallon is also very good at showing the ways in which political and pop-culture events influence how people conceive of themselves, as when Tim, hungry for details about Hawk's past but not wanting to own up to his curiosity, finds himself asking questions with a feigned casualness, "like an undercover agent in East Berlin." At moments like this, he brings to mind the writer who, for me, has done the most to turn historical fiction into art: Penelope Fitzgerald.

But Mallon's determination never to let the reader forget when and where the action is taking place can be distracting, even disruptive. He can come off sounding like a policy wonk ("He joked that the federal government's dismissal of fourteen hundred security risks was assisting the attrition through which it was supposed to shed itself of fifty thousand civilian employees by next June") or a researcher so enamored by his discoveries that he feels determined to shoehorn them in.

Usually, though, his storytelling is brisk and seductive. Throughout Fellow Travelers, he displays an expert's knowledge of how to wield the novelist's most effective tools, suspense and elision. His characters engage in swift, bantering repartee that is all the more winning for its artificiality. Nor is he afraid to employ cinematic locales (Joe McCarthy's wedding reception), hyperbolic gestures (especially slaps), even a little softcore role-play ("Who owns you?" Fuller whispers into Tim's ear, the first time they sleep together). As chapter flows into chapter, Capitol Hill jargon gives way casually to the sort of lurid kitsch that would thrill the queeny habitués of the D.C. gay bars that Hawk sometimes trawls. One can't help but applaud Mallon's refusal to cede to the arbiters of good taste, not to mention his flouting of the workshop masters who insist that in novels politics must be reduced to an easily digestible pablum.

All told, there's something wonderfully over-the-top about Fellow Travelers, and particularly about Hawk, who, starting with his penetrating name, is a sort of fill-in-the-blanks avatar of masculine potency. And while his aw-shucks humor and sheeny wit eventually betray his spiritual emptiness, these qualities also allow him to pass the State department's queer test with flying colors. Not surprisingly, he's a "top." Tim, by contrast, is as much of a "foggy bottom" as the D.C. neighborhood in which he and Hawk tryst.

Tim's efforts to reconcile his homosexuality with his Catholicism lead his mind in circles of intellectual striving no less vicious than the whirlwind of corruption in which McCarthy endlessly churns. Contemplating "the possibility that there really was no such thing as happiness or unhappiness," Tim concludes: "Maybe there was only intensity -- and then everything else." Intensity Hawk provides in spades -- its darkness and its joyfulness both -- and when, after numerous brawls, threats and boozers, Tim finds himself being groped by a drunk Joe McCarthy, Fellow Travelers reaches an apotheosis of its own, as Mallon weaves potboiler and political history into a bright rainbow flag of a novel.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (May 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307388905
• ISBN-13: 978-0307388902
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #335,849 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great read, May 6, 2007

By	SWAMP FOX "harvardhistorybuff" (OAKLAND, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fellow Travelers: A Novel (Hardcover)

For anyone who lived through the Joe McCarthy era and followed politics, this book is a wonderful read. The characters, real and imaginary, are
described in vivid detail, from the McCarthy committee and entourage to gay journalist Joe Alsop, to LBJ. The political and social aspects of this part of the plot seem very authentic. It reminds me of that other chronicler of Washington politics in the 50s, Allen Drury.

All of this hangs on a gay love story between a polished older aristocratic Protestant State Department official, the love object, and a young Catholic man who falls head over heels; the story has many twists and turns, but the older official at State is not emotionally available to reciprocate this unconditional and passionate love; he is instead into casual sex with pickups in bars and alleys. If the ending seems sad, that is what the 50s were like in America for many gay men who lacked any conception of an equal loving gay relationship.

There are many truly funny moments, including a D.C. law which says that a man cannot cruise a gay bar with drink in hand; stationary cruising was apparently ok.

The third theme in the books is the younger man's attempt to reconcile his
Catholicism with being gay; this is quite a struggle in the 1950s Church,
and is no more successful than the younger man's attempt to love a sophisticated older man who cannot reciprocate. Indeed, the parallels between the young man's relationship with the older man and his relationship with the Catholic Church run throughout the story.

I intend to read more Thomas Mallon books.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Travel Well, Travel Sad, May 4, 2007

By	Frank Berkeley (Florida, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fellow Travelers: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a story of love in the time of McCarthyism. Anyone who loves history and gay relationships will appreciate this book, although the ending is quite sad. Hawkins is a State Department up-and-comer who meets and assists Fordham-novice Tim. From both of their jobs they are intimately involved in the McCarthy hearings of the 50's which author Mallon details with authentic but not overwhelming detail. What works best is the authentic and painstaking detail of Washington at the time: a beflowered floorwalker at Hecht's, Garfinckle's, Pennsylvania Avenue streetcars, WRC, Eastern Airlines, et al. The emotion is raw and the ending is depressing, but the writing is superb, just superb. This reviewer has not read any of the other works of this author, but tomorrow I'm off to the book store to find them.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historical, Poignant & Fun, July 1, 2007

By	Robert Chadwick "robbchadwick" (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fellow Travelers: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is the first book I've read by Thomas Mallon, even though I already own "Bandbox". I will be certain to read it now and probably all the rest. I was very young during the time this novel covers; but I find it fascinating. The novel has peaked my interest in Washington as a city. I've been there before; but now I really want to visit again to delve into the city. Even though it would probably be impossible to separate government totally from the city, this novel reminds us that Washington has and always will be a place to live as well.

An amazing amount of research was put into this novel. An unbelievable number of references to actual living persons during this period and actual events related to them add a touch of authenticity. Other individuals are woven into the story in minor ways to add an even greater feel of the 1950's. During a weekend visit to New Orleans, Tim even meets Clay Shaw at a time long before the Kennedy assassination and it's aftermath in New Orleans. Whether this meeting was based on an actual event or simply a narrative invention is not known; but the novel is full of these sidelines.

The story of Tim & Hawk was absolutely wonderful and so true to life as it was then. For the reviewer who gave the novel one star because he/she thought it would be impossible for two men to carry on a relationship right under the nose of all their associates without actually coming out, I just want to ask this person when he/she plans to remove the blinders. Men have always done this, especially then. In addition, it would be true to say that in most cases, they weren't fooling anyone except themselves in believing that no one knew. I guess it was a sort of 50's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" kind of mentality. Believe me it existed; it still does.

It is heartbreaking and yet so nostalgic to read about Tim's thoughts and feelings regarding Hawk and how he obsesses over the meaning of every word or gesture from his somewhat older and more experienced love object. It is heartbreaking and sad in a different way to look at things from Hawk's perspective because he was, in a way, less qualified as a candidate to lead a double life since he doesn't know restraint nearly as intimately as Tim. Yet Hawk becomes the one to lead that double life, placing himself out of reach of true happiness forever.

After reading this novel, I long to find others with similar themes with stories from the 1950's. Not since "Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life 1918-1945" has there been such an intimate look at the lives of gay individuals during a period of time long ago. I really recommend "Fellow Travelers" to anyone, gay or straight. There is much within it's covers for all of us.