In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing (Age of Unreason) Book

Every profession is rich in what might be called marginalia: odd rituals, freakish human behaviors, and accidental blessings. In his second essay collection, Thomas Mallon admits to his love of the incidental in his own trade: "I have always been drawn to literature's suburbs." No wonder In Fact includes pieces on fan mail, obituaries, indexing, handwriting, the book tour, and plagiarism. Yet Mallon has more than marginal points to make. In his rumination on plagiarism, he discusses the frustrations of a poet who's had his work pilfered, and concludes: "In these times when there are fewer and fewer ways to be unlike everyone else--writing, with its fingerprint uniqueness, its irreducibility, may be more precious than ever to those who produce it." This sense of the "fingerprint uniqueness" of writing infuses the entire book. Having fled academe to become a novelist (Dewey Defeats Truman , Henry and Clara, Two Moons), Mallon wrote the "Doubting Thomas" book column in GQ for a decade. A clutch of his reviews are collected here, and his critical writing has a feeling of urgency: this guy believes books matter. His passions are most evident (and most entertaining) when he's writing about books he doesn't like. His review of David Guterson's East of the Mountains, for example, contains this felicitous reference to the same author's bestselling debut, Snow Falling on Cedars: "Let us start by trying to divine the appeal of the by now ubiquitous Cedars." The sentence possesses the refined disgust of someone holding a dead mouse between forefinger and thumb. Elsewhere Mallon takes on DeLillo, Wolfe, and Vidal, along with such past masters as H.L. Mencken, Siegfried Sassoon, and John Kennedy Toole. One caveat: Most of these essays were written for a magazine with the word gentleman right in its title, and women get short shrift here. Mary McCarthy--"an object of youthful admiration, then a critical subject, and eventually a friend"--makes several appearances, and Jane Smiley receives an enthusiastic notice. Otherwise, this is Boy's Town. --Claire DedererRead More