About the Author

THOMAS MALLON is the author of eleven novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, and Landfall. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In  2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

“Sharp-eyed ... Some of the most lucid prose in contemporary American literature.... [Mallon's] best book yet."
—Los Angeles Times

"Mallon writes crisp, buoyant prose, and he has a perfect ear for his period."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Exuberant.... Brisk and seductive."
—The Washington Post Book World

“Brilliant.... This is Mallon's best historical novel, period, and better than most contemporary novels of any stripe.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

McCarthy-era Washington, D.C., is as twisted and morally compromised as a noir Los Angeles in Mallon's latest, a wide-ranging examination of betrayal and clashing ideologies. The young ladies in the secretary pool are agog over dapper bureaucrat Hawkins Fuller, though his attentions covertly focus on newly minted Fordham graduate and good Catholic Tim Laughlin. Hawkins helps Tim land a job and, after feeling out the impressionable young man, makes a place in his bed for him. Mary Johnson, a friend to both closeted men, watches with rising alarm as Tim and Hawkins carry on their affair and Washington seethes in paranoia over Communists and "sexual deviation." Mary, meanwhile, succumbs to her own lustful yearnings and has an affair with a married businessman, leading to a predictable, though deftly played, quandary. The District's social milieu is solidly realized, with such period icons as Mary McGrory and Drew Pearson in evidence alongside political heavyweights-McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon and the like. Less convincing, however, is the on-again-off-again and largely one-sided relationship between Washington greenhorn Tim and cold, calculating careerist Hawkins. Mallon (Bandbox; Dewey Defeats Truman) offers an intricate, fluent and divergent perspective on a D.C. rife with backstabbing and power grabbing. (May) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

"Sharp-eyed ... Some of the most lucid prose in contemporary American literature.... [Mallon's] best book yet."
-Los Angeles Times

"Mallon writes crisp, buoyant prose, and he has a perfect ear for his period."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Exuberant.... Brisk and seductive."
-The Washington Post Book World

"Brilliant.... This is Mallon's best historical novel, period, and better than most contemporary novels of any stripe."
-The Philadelphia Inquirer