THE VERY HEART OF IT: New York Diaries, 1983-1994, by Thomas Mallon
Is it possible to be kind, sensible, polite, well-adjusted and cheerful, and keep a diary that’s worth anyone’s time? That’s the question that confronts the reader of “The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994,” by the gifted but ultra-earnest novelist and critic Thomas Mallon. He’s so nice that he drives me out the window. (In a movie, he’d be played by Matthew Broderick in Izod shirts and tweeds.)
Mallon, a longtime New Yorker who now lives in Washington, is the author of 11 well-regarded novels that are historical or political in theme, including “Henry and Clara” and “Fellow Travelers.” His many nonfiction books include “A Book of One’s Own,” about literary diaries, and “Stolen Words,” about plagiarism in theory and practice.
For several years in the 1990s he was the literary editor of GQ. This was back when men’s magazines a) had platinum-level expense accounts and b) routinely, and in retrospect incredibly, fought to publish the best short stories in all the land. He’s also been a stalwart contributor of reviews and essays to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. I enjoyed it when, in these diaries, he refers to this publication’s old offices on West 43rd Street in Manhattan as being as “grubby as a police precinct,” because that’s indeed what they resembled — albeit if the detectives had detonated the contents of a used bookstore inside.
I hung in there with Mallon’s diaries, and they (sort of) softened me up. This isn’t because Mallon cries frequently — upon finishing John Updike’s “Rabbit” series, upon the death of Richard Nixon, when a man he loves hasn’t called, when he’s had a bad review — but because his diaries capture the youthful mood of a certain period in New York City, because he’s a careful observer and because his naïveté is sometimes winning, in the manner of a pensive number in a Sondheim musical about a new kid in town. Every writer probably needs a bit of this quality to see the world plain.
These diaries begin in 1983, when Mallon was in his early 30s and on the verge of obtaining tenure in the English department at Vassar. His second book, the one on diaries, was about to drop. He’s new in Manhattan, a gay man bending toward neoconservatism, relatively virginal and unsure in this pre-dating-app era how to meet anyone except in sketchy bars. This is early in the AIDS crisis, and confusion and terror are omnipresent.
Mallon is young, pretty and “so horny I felt like going out & jumping a sidewalk Santa.” He does enter those bars and writes, wonderfully: “I am the boy who cried wolf, and then went looking, again and again, for one more wolf.” After an AIDS scare, and a screening of the film “The Bounty,” he reports:
All day I’d been making bargains with God: Just let me live and I’ll be content with work and writing and friendship — I’ll retire from sex forever. Then I saw Mel Gibson on the screen and thought: This isn’t going to be easy.
The plague is a through-line in these dairies. Friends and lovers die around him. Fearful of Kaposi’s sarcoma, he checks his arms for freckles that aren’t freckles and worries about colds that may be more than colds. He settles down. He’s vastly more interested in gentle lovemaking, this book makes plain, than in injudicious rutting. He wants to be “protected, cuddled, adored.” Lovers like to take Mallon back to their hometowns, because he so resembles “a model middle-aged, middle-class homosexual to worried parents.”
He falls into literary criticism to pay the bills, and discovers he has a knack for it. It’s typical of Mallon’s guileless tone that when he gets a breakthrough assignment, he has “omigosh-I’ve-done-it thoughts.” He writes for a blizzard of daily newspapers, almost none of which publish reviews any longer. The death of the American book review, the stake driven through its heart during these past three decades, is one of the great underreported stories of our time.
His own books begin to appear, and he slowly takes leave of Vassar and academia. Politically, he’s begun to feel like an outlier there. (“Do I really want to be in a place where Milton is taught for the racism & sexism in his work?”) Mallon mostly wears his right-leaning politics lightly. There is an account here of his work as a ghostwriter on Dan Quayle’s 1994 memoir, “Standing Firm.” Mallon found Quayle and his family charming.
The reviews of his own books rock him, again and again, to his core. A rave, from Updike in The New Yorker, makes him feel “shot from a cannon.” All his feathers puff up. Negative ones sink him for days: “I feel disemboweled, eviscerated, mortally wounded … All because of one paragraph by someone named Brad.”
A lot of personages pass through these pages. The boldface names tend to have a pat of butter, or a droplet of acid, appended to their names: Michael Chabon (“pretty”), Jane Smiley (“unaffected and gawky”), Susan Sontag (“a thumping bore”), Ann Carson (arms “like pipe cleaners”), Dotson Rader (“a drunken idiot”), Richard Ford (“probably in the process of killing something with Tom McGuane”), May Swenson (“helmet-haired”), Shirley Hazzard (“a studied tweeness”), Lynn Nesbit (“a truly frightening woman”) and Tom Disch (“weird polar bear”).
His deepest animus is for the novelist David Leavitt, a gay writer whose star shone intensely in the ’80s and whom Mallon must have envied. He considers him self-important and writes, “There are no bones in Leavitt’s hand: It’s like shaking a chicken patty.” The scenes in the second half of these diaries are stolen by Art Cooper, the boozy, bearish and often besieged editor of GQ from 1983 to 2003. He’s a sight to behold.
“The Very Heart of It” functions as a Woody Allen-like ode to New York City. Mallon feels lucky, nearly every day, to be here, what with the Frick, the Carlyle and “the Chrysler Building twinkling across the street like the world’s ultimate Christmas tree.”
To make it through these diaries, you’ll have to put up with many lines like: “Yeah, I get lonely on trips like this, but I’m also a spunky, resourceful little guy. So let’s hear it for Tom tonight!” You may occasionally fight the urge to pull Tom’s beanie down over his eyes and push his tricycle gently off a pier.
On the other hand, it’s hard to dislike the man who wrote, on one Fourth of July in the ’80s: “Yes, God Bless America and keep my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
THE VERY HEART OF IT: New York Diaries, 1983-1994 | By Thomas Mallon | Knopf | 573 pp. | $40
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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