IN FACT: ESSAYS ON WRITERS AND WRITING; by Thomas Mallon; Pantheon, 352 pages; $26.95.
A popular writer both of fiction and non-fiction, Thomas Mallon has assembled an exceptionally interesting collection of his essays on writing, most of them previously published in Gentleman's Quarterly, The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and Harper's.
A literary critic of the old school, Mallon's writing about other writers is admittedly "old fashioned." He writes longer pieces than usual for criticism, and thus he treats both the positive and negative qualities he finds in such contemporary writers as Nicholas Baker, Peter Carey, Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion and Robert Stone.
He also assesses the work of such earlier 20th century figures as John O'Hara, Sinclair Lewis, Truman Capote and Mary McCarthy. The latter is a favorite of his, and so he uses her writing as an ongoing thread throughout the book. In addition, Mallon contemplates an array of literary aspects, such as book indexes, obituaries, plagiarism, canceled checks, fan mail and author tours.
The essays published here are charming, down-to-earth and colorful because of numerous clever and insightful anecdotes. Mallon's writing stands out because, although trained as an academic at Harvard, he writes in a universal sort of style that attracts great diversity among readers. He uses his wit generously but never in an obnoxious way. Besides being a talented writer, he is a voracious reader who knows what he's talking about.
In writing critiques of other writers, for instance, he cites specific books and articles, as well as interesting details about their professional lives. Anyone who earns his or her living as a writer is bound to be mesmerized by the book, even to the point of tracking down the author's long list of other books and digesting those, too.
In analyzing Tom Wolfe's work, Mallon says, "The inescapable impression is that Wolfe himself has seen most of the city's poor precincts only from the backseat of a limo." Taking on David Guterson's best-selling novel, "Snow Falling on Cedars," Mallon says, "None of the book is half-so-well-written as an episode of "The Practice," and that "a reader wishes he would send out for more verbs."
John O'Hara's work, said Mallon, "has pretty much defied resuscitation," and he has little respect for the historical techniques used by Edmund Morris in his disappointing biography of Ronald Reagan, "Dutch."
Yet, he has unqualified praise for John Updike, Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal.
He spends considerable time treating his favorite form of writing — historical fiction — comparing his own impressions from his own work with several other authors of the genre. Although he generally respects the written work of history professors more than he does English professors, he still favors the historical novel and argues that it can be surprisingly accurate on historic details.
Mallon thinks readers like historical fiction "not because they wanted to drag history into the present and make it useful but because they wanted to put themselves back into history . . . to wander around it as if in a dream, to ponder themselves as having been born too late."
But Mallon's most interesting conclusion is that historical fiction is called for in either of two situations — "when the facts have been lost to time, and when a time has been lost to the facts."
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