In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing.(Review)

Thomas Mallon In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing. Pantheon, 352 pages, $26.95

Thomas Mallon did not, in fact, set out to become a historical novelist, much less a writer of against-the-grain cultural essays and literary criticism, but he had not counted on the damage that heavy theory would inflict on such vital organs as the head, heart, and ears of academia. As a worker in the vineyard of modern British literature, Mallon, when an assistant professor at Vassar, found himself faced with the daunting task of reviewing a book on Joseph Conrad packed to the gills with jaw-breaking sentences about "ontic vacancy" and "multiplicative inverses." What to do? He could, of course, have given back sentences as good as he got, making it clear that he was one bright, up-and-coming cookie. Instead, Mallon served up the unvarnished truth about this book and dozens of others then pouring out of what were once our best university presses: "no one should write like this, ever." But in arguing that critical prose was "rapidly moving beyond the Latinate and towards the Martian," Mallon now admits that he was, in fact, telling himself to look for another job.

Fortunately, the heady days of high theory largely passed; unfortunately, they were replaced by the litany of race, class, and gender--so much so that, as Mallon rightly points out, they often "seemed to be one angry word, raceclassgender." Thus it was that in the fall of 1987, Mallon found himself on his department's hiring committee, plowing his way through dissertation chapters less interested in books than with one version or another of identity politics. Enough was enough, and the next year Mallon called it quits, giving up the comforts of tenure for life as a full-time writer. Since then he has eleven books to his credit, nearly equally divided between fiction and nonfiction.

In Fact is at once a generous collection of pieces he wrote for such magazines as The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, and Gentlemen's Quarterly, and an ongoing exercise in autobiography. I say the latter because when Mallon writes about contemporaries such as Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, and Joan Didion or reassesses the likes of John O'Hara, Sinclair Lewis, and Truman Capote, he reveals not only a good deal about the writers under discussion but also, perhaps, even more about what piques his curiosity and engages his imagination. In reviewing a single book, he often uses the occasion to survey a writer's career and to judge its cultural importance. Mallon also peppers his reviews with delicious ...