Word: mcmahons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
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...
Mathematically, McKay's reckonings are right. But his plans to establish a thriving humstead naturally go wrong, and this is the matter of Thomas McMahon's fine, small, funny second novel. McMahon is a professor of applied mechanics and biology at Harvard. Nine years ago. he wrote Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel. It told of a teen-age boy growing up among the scientists at Los Alamos. N. Mex., as they calculated their way toward the atomic bomb. Here the author sets his sights backward by 100 years to spoof the pre-Darwinian notion of nature...
...raids between Missouri and Kansas, and hatred of Eastern abolitionists, shake McKay's project to the ground. The bees get a disease; most of them die. McKay and Catherine retreat to Boston. In the process, real people as well as real historical events glance off the angles of McMahon's sto ry. Among the people: Louis Agassiz, 19th century America's most celebrated naturalist, cold to Darwin's evolutionary theories because he regards each species of plant or animal as. "in itself, a thought...
...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...