Word: mallon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Thomas Mallon...
...academic pressure has not stopped scholars from leading a double life, scholar by day and novelist by night. Now Thomas Mallon has returned to the scene of Segal's crime, Arts and Sciences, his first fictional work, tells the story of a young man's passage into adulthood in Cambridge, Mass...
...Mallon attempts to relieve the tedium of his stereotypical plot by creating exaggerated characters who often seem more ridiculous than humorous. Mallon's penchant for defying convention, if even in the most conventional of ways, is evident in his intentional mangling of the names of Harvard buildings. Sever Hall is reincarnated as Cleaver, and Warren House is transposed to Warble House...
...Mallon delights in his disregard for the facts. In a disclaimer he writes, "Just as the people herein never existed, and the incidents described didn't happen, all sorts of Harvard rules, buldings and curricula, along with other bits of reality, have been tampered with and rearranged in order to accommodate this novel's fictive whims and entirely harmless purpose...
Some readers may enjoy Thomas Mallon's light tour-guide approach. For those who do not, the book is nevertheless redeemed by its superb selection of diarists from all walks of life. In his extensive reading of the obscure as well as the class.., Mallon has stumbled upon some marvelous passages and some intriguing characters. His book is "populated by writers, dancers, madmen, statesman, lovers, assassins, philosophers, housewives, soldiers, and children"--all in all a rich host o: "selves." It is a pity that they are all sapped and leveled by the author's uninteresting prose. We can only hope...