Perspective: A tasty turn at literary criticism

A few years ago a good friend of mine bequeathed to me a set of the Paris Review's Writers at Work, a series of interviews published by that journal every 10 or so years. Though tattered and bound in cheap paper, the books are a treasure-trove for an aspiring writer. Edited by Alfred Kazin, Van Wyck Brooks and Malcolm Cowley, they feature conversations with the brightest lights in modern American letters, from Robert Lowell to John Updike, Flannery O'Connor to Jack Kerouac. As I read the interviews, I discovered what, exactly, fueled these writers' creative engines, what trials and failures. I felt not only closer to the essence of genius but more sure that somewhere out there someone was living the literary life I wanted.

Though I've looked long and hard, I've yet to find a Paris Review volume that spans the '90s. In its place on the shelf I'll probably slip in Thomas Mallon's entertaining and enriching new collection of literary pieces, In Fact.

A biographer, historical novelist and former critic for GQ, Mallon has what one of his subjects, Tom Wolfe, would call "The Right Stuff" to guide us through the hurly-burly world of '90s fiction. It was a decade marked by male writers' comically obvious obsession with largesse. From authors like Robert Stone to Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo to Thomas Pynchon, serious readers in the '90s devoured fiction by the yard. But as Mallon's selections here also point out, some of the decades' sleepers -- like Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 to Nicholson Baker's odd little books -- wielded more brains than girth.

Like the best criticism, Mallon's essays, most of which were previously published in GQ, bring these books into sharper and broader focus. This stereoscopic view comes in part from Mallon's talents as a novelist, for he peppers the same lively metaphors into criticism that he employs in his fiction. Don DeLillo's Underworld "is a big Buick of a book," while the stylized work of Howard Norman "seems somehow less like an oeuvre than an eccentric stash, similar to the cryptic paintings and antique radios and wooden bird decoys that line the pages of the books themselves." Although written to a limited word-count for a monthly magazine, such fancy turns of phrase lift Mallon's criticism from the page.

Meanwhile, while I found myself wishing he had lengthened some of these essays, Mallon's intelligence still gives this ship formidable ballast. A former professor at Vassar, Mallon draws illuminating literary connections, mapping out genealogies that encourage us to read further. In lauding Peter Carey's virtually flawless performance in Jack Maggs, Mallon aptly reminds us that literary influences from Forster to Conrad have haunted Carey throughout his career. And in obliterating David Leavitt's While England Slept, Mallon describes the kind of confectionery batter that resulted in such a sour tart: "The whole production is a sort of syllabus, the Bloomsbury unit preceding classes on the Auden Generation, the Victorian references and bits of Dickensian coincidence retrieved from last year's prerequisite courses." As evident in this passage, Mallon, like many reviewers, is more fun to read when talking down -- rather than praising -- a subject. His essay on David Guterson's bad apple, East of the Mountains, is a screamer.

One regrets the fact that Mallon had to follow publishing schedules rather than personal whimsy, for the "Off the Shelf" pieces struggle heroically against notoriously boring subjects -- Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos and Siegfried Sassoon. Deft with biographical detail, Mallon attains better results with writers whose legends will outlive their words, such as John O'Hara, Mary McCarthy, and H.L. Mencken. It is in delicious anecdotal details -- such as O'Hara's habit of reading seven newspapers a day or Edmund Wilson's way of processing fan mail (printing up 22 categorized responses) -- that the people who craft literature spring to life.

In the end, Mallon has an archivist's affection for the musty, the forgotten and the tragically overlooked. Though this trait leads to some unfruitful detours, more often it deepens our understanding of contemporary literature. In this regard, In Fact does more than just provide a driving tour of the past decade and a half in letters. It fosters the one quality Mallon has in spades: skepticism.

John Freeman is a freelance writer living in New York City.

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IN FACT:

Essays on Writers and Writing

By Thomas Mallon

(Pantheon, $26.95)

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