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Editorial Reviews
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History may be written by the victors, but the finest historical fiction can explore a more varied--and often more vivid--constellation of characters and truths. In his lustrous fifth novel, Thomas Mallon brings some real figures to complex life and creates several others who are so brilliantly present it's hard to believe they have no past. Set in the late 1870s in Washington, D.C., a welter of aspiration, instability, and malaria, Two Moons is as taut with energy and anticipation as its four main players. When the novel opens, 35-year-old Cynthia May is determined to escape her typing job at the Interior Department and become a human "computer" at the Naval Observatory. For much of her life, she has had little to calculate but her considerable losses: both her twin brother and her husband were lost to the war, and her daughter was lost to diphtheria. But things are about to change. When she sits for the required exam, Cynthia handily thrashes the competition. "She set about filling in the table, sprinkling the numbers like raisins into a cupcake tin." Like his contemporary Andrea Barrett, to whom the book is dedicated, Mallon artfully draws us into the powers and pleasures of science:
History may be written by the victors, but the finest historical fiction can explore a more varied--and often more vivid--constellation of characters and truths. In his lustrous fifth novel, Thomas Mallon brings some real figures to complex life and creates several others who are so brilliantly present it's hard to believe they have no past. Set in the late 1870s in Washington, D.C., a welter of aspiration, instability, and malaria, Two Moons is as taut with energy and anticipation as its four main players. When the novel opens, 35-year-old Cynthia May is determined to escape her typing job at the Interior Department and become a human "computer" at the Naval Observatory. For much of her life, she has had little to calculate but her considerable losses: both her twin brother and her husband were lost to the war, and her daughter was lost to diphtheria. But things are about to change. When she sits for the required exam, Cynthia handily thrashes the competition. "She set about filling in the table, sprinkling the numbers like raisins into a cupcake tin." Like his contemporary Andrea Barrett, to whom the book is dedicated, Mallon artfully draws us into the powers and pleasures of science:
Her columns grew longer, and if she squinted at them, the confetti of inklings began to resemble a skyful of stars. She had time to let her mind wander. The Magi's search for Bethlehem; the music of Milton's crystal spheres; the prognostications of the D Street astrologer in whose parlor Cynthia had lately spent a dollar she could not afford: they could all be reduced to these numbers. There was actually no need to squint and pretend that the digits were the stars. They were, by themselves, wildly alive, fact and symbol of the vast, cool distances in which one located the light of different worlds.Mallon is also wildly alive to his characters' emotions. Cynthia would very much like Hugh Allison, the handsome antic astronomer in charge of the exam, to pick her professionally and personally. With both goals in mind, she heads straight for her neighborhood astrologer. But Mary Costello, who has less of a head for the stars than for survival, is expecting an important senator. If all goes well, the charming charlatan can keep this VIP in her pseudo-planetary sphere for some time. It is Cynthia, though, who lets "the War God" in--and instantly holds as much attraction for him as Hugh does for her: "Roscoe Conkling--who had spent an active amatory life hoping never to be surprised by a second woman in any room where he had arranged to meet but one--drew back, though only for a moment."
And this is only the beginning. Over the course of his supple novel, Mallon teases out the agitations of love, power, and discovery. Cynthia, Hugh, Mary, and Conkling are each searching for different versions of "the choicest blessings of heaven." Of the four, Hugh's feverish aspiration may be the most tantalizing--even if his "immortal yearnings" cost him his career and life. Mallon is an artist of the intimate moment (witness the novel's heartbreaking coda), and in his hands Hugh and Cynthia are the very opposite of dull, sublunary lovers. In addition, as he has already displayed in Dewey Defeats Truman and Henry and Clara, the author is equally intrigued by political intrigue, and remakes Conkling in all his ambition, absurdity, and considerable threat. For Cynthia, the senator may be "a comet of highly doubtful periodicity," but her sharp-judging creator knows his reach is long and violent.
Two Moons is as lucid and mysterious as the stars some of its scientifics seek night after night. With his present dream of several past dreams, Thomas Mallon gathers his characters into the artifice of eternity. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
Mallon's fifth novel invokes the central themes of his last three--astronomy (Aurora 7), 19th-century Washington (Henry & Clara) and the common ground of social and sexual politics (Dewey Defeats Truman). Unfortunately, the result is as studied as it sounds, and to the themes that Mallon has built so interestingly upon, he has added little here, despite the enormous promise of the book's Big Metaphor--the two moons of Mars. The story's setting is the nation's capital in the early years of Reconstruction; Rutherford B. Hayes is president, and there is a wave of reform in the air. Two moons--or rather, men--orbit a radiant planet--or rather, a woman. Roscoe Conkling, a corrupt senator from New York, as the larger moon, is entranced by the bright and independent-minded Cynthia May, a Civil War widow in her 30s. Conkling's competition is a fair-haired, diffident Southerner--the smaller moon, Hugh Allison--who has the advantage of Cynthia's affections. Cynthia and Hugh are colleagues at the funds-strapped Naval Observatory, located in the malarial Foggy Bottom section of D.C. But the observatory's discovery of two Martian moons, one large, one small, brings new hope that the astronomy center will get a new building in a healthier setting. Meanwhile, Hugh, a contrarian romantic, convinces Cynthia of a grander celestial strategy: "Stop thinking of what comes to us," he tells her, "[s]uch as the Sun's light.... Start thinking of the light that might come from us." Cynthia embarks on a secret plan to grease the wheels for Hugh to acquire a high-powered lamp from France and get it through U.S. Customs in New York, a "machine" run by Senator Conkling. His intention is to mount it atop the still incomplete Washington Monument and send a light into the heavens. This poorly developed plot element soon gets eclipsed when Hugh is bitten by a mosquito, sealing his fate, and Cynthia's, and abrogating the reader's interest. Although Mallon reliably marshals the kind of period detail that makes him a formidable historical novelist--the nickel dropped into a glass box as fare on the horse carriages of the capital--too often the minutiae becomes annoying in the absence of emotional color or narrative movement. In addition, Mallon's reluctance to expose the passions underlying the characters' lives lengthens the distance we already feel from the Washington of the 1870s. This reticence is a true shortcoming when the parallels between the Foggy Bottom malaria and today's AIDS crisis occur to the reader. The two moons of Mars are glimpsed but for a short time, not to return for two more years to the aided eyes of the observatory. More could have been made of them.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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