It isn't even past.(Bandbox)(Book Review)

Bandbox, by Thomas Mallon (Pantheon, 306 pp., $24.95)

TIME travel is the pornography of eggheads. What reasonably well-read person wouldn't jump in the Wayback Machine if he could? You don't have to be a science-fiction geek to wonder what the day before yesterday looked and smelled and tasted like. Small wonder, then, that filmmakers love to turn back the clock, though they tend not to do it especially well, getting the surface spectacularly right (the best thing about Hollywood is its art directors) and the substance hopelessly wrong. For that, one must go to novelists, who don't have to stay up late worrying about how to make a city block look exactly the way it did in 1952. Instead, they can concentrate on the small stuff--the way people talked and thought--and when it comes to the past, the small stuff is the big stuff.

Thomas Mallon, an ardent novelistic time traveler, has set his Wayback Machine to 1928 for Bandbox, the souffle-light tale of a popular magazine of the Roaring Twenties whose motto is "a sound mind in a sound body in a good suit." He is, as usual, perfectly sound on the small stuff. In the first 20 pages alone, he makes accurate and unostentatious reference to pneumatic tubes, six-dollar quarts of hooch, Leopold and Loeb, camel-hair coats, radio stock, Arnold Rothstein, the old Vanity Fair, Ruth Snyder, Christy Mathewson, and Horace Liveright. Every once in a while the mask slips a quarter-inch or so (I don't think the word "butch" acquired its current slang meaning until somewhat later), and Mallon doesn't lay on the period detail quite so thickly as did, say, Frederick Turner in 1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age, but for the most part you'll rattle along quite comfortably in his hand-built Duesenberg, taking in the painted scenery and marveling at how real the props look.

Needless to say, accurate period detail alone does not a readable novel make, and Mallon has set himself a considerable challenge in writing about journalism. In the insufficiently remembered words of Harold Ross, who knew a thing or two about what it was like to put out a magazine in the Twenties, "Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer." The good news is that Mallon steers well away from this particular Slough of Despond, using his characters' richly varied problems as fodder for knockabout comedy. The protagonist of Bandbox, Jehoshaphat "Joe" Harris, is an aging editor whose once-hot book (as they say in the magazine biz) is under siege from Jimmy Gordon, a disloyal protege who now edits a clothes-and-prose monthly of his own. Not surprisingly, Bandbox turns out to be staffed by a gaggle of loonies who can barely manage to get up in the morning, much less make their deadlines, and the fight to the finish between Bandbox and Cutaway ends up being fought not with pistols for two but cream pies and pratfalls.

To disclose the details would be to diminish the delight, so I'll keep them to myself, save to say that Calvin Coolidge has a very funny walk-on and that the forces of journalistic good (so to speak) triumph in the end. Nor do I care to ape today's let-it-all-hang-out movie trailers by previewing ...