Word: mcmahon
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Mild-mannered Thomas A. McMahon spends most of his time as McKay Professor of Applied Mechanics. But once every ten years or so, he ducks into a Pierce Hall phone booth, and emerges as Thomas McMahon, author...
...interim--his last novel, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry, was published almost ten years ago--McMahon keeps up appearances as a scientist and teacher. His field is biomechanics--how people work as machines, why animals grow to the sizes and shapes they do, why trees assume graceful shapes. McMahon designed Harvard's indoor track, which features a specially cushioned surface that improves a good runner's mile by as much as several seconds...
...does fiction fit into all this? Writing fiction, McMahon claims, is a lot like doing science...
FICTION: Cannibals and Missionaries, Mary McCarthy -Collected Stories, Paul Bowles -Endless Love, Scott Spencer -Letters, John Barth -McKay's Bees, Thomas McMahon -Sophie's Choice, William Styron -The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth...
...McMahon's book is a marvel of brains, brevity and sharp description. He flashes around like a lightning bug briefly casting a glow on some detail or other: what it's like to travel on the Erie Canal: how a character is inadvertently shot; the way in which daguerreotypes are made. He does a lot with bees too, but. as the book implies, they have enough metaphorical possibilities for a series of novels. A hive is a feminist state, with an automatic system for keeping warm that is activated when the temperature in the hive drops...