In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing

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;

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.