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Thomas Mallon : In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing (Age of Unreason) before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing (Age of Unreason):

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Nice group of essaysBy Christopher (o.d.c.)Art Cooper's GQ was probably the best magazine of its time (turn of the millennium), and Thomas Mallon was one of the regular columnists who made it great. I picked up this book (or e-book) as an antidote to the overrated The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (Modern Library Paperbacks).Personally, I think Mallon deserves the Pulitzer Prize for calling his David Guterson review "Snow Falling on Readers." Here is the opening of his review of another contemporary:NO, A Man in Full is not as good as The Bonfire of the Vanities, so why donrsquo;t we get that out of the way right here at the start, and even offer a couple of excuses. For one thing, few American novels of the last twenty years have been as good as Tom Wolfersquo;s first work of fiction (published in 1987, when he was 56), and for another, the rsquo;90s havenrsquo;t been anything so wonderfulmdash;O tempora! O mores!mdash;as the rsquo;80s. Back then we had a real presidmdash; No, let me restrain myself. Let me start over. Let me make the simple bipartisan literary point that when it comes to subject matter, the rsquo;90s have not been quite so outsize as the rsquo;80s, which is only to say that no current novel can be expected to get so gaudy a purchase on this period as Bonfire did on its own...What can I say? This is a very appealing style. Here are two quotes from an essay on Sinclair Lewis which are both spot on:... The lack of much emotional development in Lewisrsquo;s characters may make for a certain psychological realism, but it also results in narrative tedium. These very long books consist largely of characters who are constantly lapsing back into being themselves, opening and shutting like morning glories. It is odd that novels with such attitude, such thematic edge, should be so shapeless, so spasmodic and repetitious.[...]Lewis is to slang what Mark Twain is to dialect. He has a grotesque facility for reproducing it, a talent like playing the saw or cracking knuckles. The listener concedes the skill being displayed while begging the performer to stop. Whether itrsquo;s Elmer Gantryrsquo;s sermons (he has one called ldquo;Whoa Up, Youth!rdquo;) or the patter of Babbittrsquo;s little manicurist (ldquo;[B]elieve me, I know how to hop those birds! I just give um the north and south and ask um, lsquo;Say, who do you think yoursquo;re talking to?rsquo; and they fade away like loversquo;s young nightmarerdquo;), Lewis has some of the sharpest nails on the American blackboard. The British edition of Babbitt even required a glossary.The literary tour of New Orleans was a standout, and made me want to read A Confederacy of Dunces, as well as American Grotesque, which I hadn't heard of before.After the contemporary reviews, and the classical authors, come a batch of fine personal essays, and observations on the writer's life:.... The owners and small staffs of the ldquo;independents,rdquo; those unchained stores doing battle with every new Barnes Noble and Borders, not only sell books but read them, too. Theyrsquo;d rather evangelize for favorite titles than talk business, but when asked, theyrsquo;ll tell you theyrsquo;re holding their ownmdash;as long as the superstores stay fifteen miles away. You shake your head and sympathize and avoid mentioning the one thing you and most of the writers you know like about the bibliobehemoths: the way theyrsquo;ve got room to keep even your oldest, obscurest paperback displayed on their shelves. Still, your heart is with the indies during this bewildering retail revolution thatrsquo;s only begun.I'm not even sure I've chosen the best excerpts (there are so many). I like a book of essays the way some people like a cozy mystery. This was my kind of book.7 of 7 people found the following review helpful. A dynamite collection.By David M. GiltinanThis 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; this unsocialized kid needed Miss Crabtree to put her in the corner."Essays I particularly enjoyed were those on the David Leavitt-Stephen Spender lawsuit, on Howard Norman (whose 'The Bird Artist' I have always considered the antidote to the appalling 'Shipping News'), on Will Self, on Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full". The essays on letters from his readers, on obituaries, on the ups and downs of the 'author book tour', and on the challenges of writing historical fiction are equally fascinating.But what clinched things, and what earned this book its fifth star is the essay "Enough about Me", which expresses his civilized but eloquent antipathy to the "emergence of memoir as a hot new publishing commodity". Someone who mirrors my own thoughts on the matter, and can express them far more eloquently than I could. What's not to love?13 of 14 people found the following review helpful. More smart than lovableBy Eileen G.Thomas Mallon is smart, has common sense, and demands that you sit up and pay attention to him. He is a fast talker, too. These pieces appeared in monthly popular magazines, where likely he was the resident curmudgeon/ intellectual - albeit with a deadline. As he explains, he spent enough time in academia, "stuffing myself like a Christmas goose (Dickens) from the groaning board of books on the prescribed reading list" to earn a doctorate in twentieth-century British literature and teach for awhile (at Vassar) before moving "up" and out, into a job as a writer and mainstream critic. Mallon loves language's usefulness - sometimes as weaponry - and revels in his ability to use it well. There are lots of smart bits, arcana and literary and cultural trivia. He does his research, and then lays it all out for the reader. He loves proper nouns, too. Sometimes there are as many as twenty on a page. I actually wished for an index to somehow gather, at book's end, the many people, places, book titles, and other index-worthy things in this collection. He sometimes goes for the jugular. (Dos Passos' "unpunctuated Joycean singsong") He can be mean and lacking in the sort of tact that (for example) an undergraduate might require - in order to ever write again. It's not appealing, for example, when he savages David Guterson -not only his first novel, but his wholly extraliterary views on a variety of other things. Mallon can turn a phrase, but sometimes it would have been better not to.In other places this long-knives approach is just what you want. Regarding Mencken's reprehensible political views, during the 1930's, Mallon writes, "These are less the genteel barbarities of another age that the eternal chant of the crazy who's just boarded the subway car." On the other hand, when Mallon approves, he says so. ("In 'The Ice Age' Margaret Drabble surveys England like a sociologist in a helicopter, a sort of digital George Eliot.")In these pieces he is brainy, unforgiving, and approves, unfortunately, of comparatively few things. Good reading, but in measured doses.

From the acclaimed novelist (Henry and Clara, Two Moons), essayist (A Book of One's Own), and critic (1998 National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing)mdash;an engaging new collection of essays.In Fact gathers the best of Thomas Mallon's superb criticism from the past twenty-two yearsmdash;essays that appeared in his GQ column, "Doubting Thomas," and in Book Review, The American Scholar, , and Harper's, among other publications. Here are his evaluations of the work of contemporary writers such as Nicholson Baker, Peter Carey, Tom Wolfe, Do DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Robert Stone, and reassessments of such earlier twentieth-century figures as John O'Hara, Sinclair Lewis, Truman Capote, and Mary McCarthy. Mallon also considers an array of odd literary genres and phenomenamdash;including book indexes, obituaries, plagiarism, cancelled checks, fan mail, and author tours. And he turns his sharp eye on historical fiction (his own genre) as well as on the history, practice, and future of memoir.Smart, unorthodox, and impassioned, this collection is an integral piece of an important literary career and an altogether marvelous read.From the Hardcover edition.

.com 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 DedererFrom Publishers WeeklyMid-length book reviews are a tough sell when put between covers, but the pedigree here will make this collection a must-have for the drier side of the Inside.com set. Mallon is the author of five respected historical novels (Henry and Clara, etc.) and solid nonfiction on plagiarism (Stolen Words) and diaries (A Book of One's Own), among other volumes. But his bread-and-butter is the feature-length review and book-biz musing, including a six-year stint as a GQ columnist ("Doubting Thomas") and regular appearances in the NYTBR and the New Yorker, among other mags. Almost all of the 45 essays here first appeared in such publications, many of them contributing to his winning the NBCC Citation for Excellence in ing in 1998--and it's easy to see why. There are great titles ("Six Feet Under but Above the Fold"; "Is God Read?") and great leads ("Half his writing life was aftermath," begins a review of a Truman Capote bio). But serious readers will find on the whole that the pieces don't work outside of their original do-I-want-to-buy-this-book? contexts, lacking a compelling critical framework beyond cogent dispatching of plots, characters and conceptual terrains. The discussions of near-canonical oeuvres (of Sinclair Lewis, John O'Hara and others) don't compel fresh readings, despite Mallon's judicious enthusiasm. And not-so- serious readers will find they already know all they want to about Snow Falling on Cedars, the mechanics of historical fiction or the author's stint at Brown. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.From BooklistMallon has won the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in reviewing, and readers of this energetic collection of essays and reviews will understand why. In his graceful introduction, Mallon recounts his escape from the jargon- laced abstractions of academe to the pages of GQ and the "real" world, his preferred locale both as reader and writer. Citing Mary McCarthy as a major influence, Mallon took to criticism with zest, writing rigorous yet supple assessments of the work of Nicholson Baker, Ward Just, and Howard Norman. This volume also contains an almost swashbuckling dissection of the Stephen Spender-David Leavitt brouhaha, and a chewy and satisfying look at the life, times, and books of Gore Vidal. Mallon himself is a skilled historical novelist (Two Moons [BKL Ja 1 15 00]), and he writes bracingly opinionated essays on biography and memoir, frankly stating his valuing of thought over feeling, fact over invention, and sense over sensibility, and his belief in the importance of writing about something other than one's self. Donna SeamanCopyright copy; American Library Association. All rights reserved

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