Arts and Sciences
Mallon, Thomas
Several years ago—in fact, the very year (1973) in which the plot of Thomas Mallon's first novel begins to unfold—Tom Wolfe wrote an, essay on "The New Journalism," wherein occurs a passing...
...Wolfe, doubtful of his ability to convey "the remotest idea" of the horrifying experience and groping through half a long paragraph for an appropriate metaphor, finally likens graduate school to "being locked inside a Seaboard Railroad roomette, sixteen miles from Gainesville, Florida, heading north on the Miami-to-New York run, with no water and the radiator turning red in an amok psychotic overboil, and George McGovern sitting beside you and telling you his philosophy of government...
...Artie is still too hung-up, too self-centered, too preoccupied with his books, and, for all his literary acumen, just too fundamentally stupid to respond to the hints...
...but she has told Artie nothing of her history, so that Artie briefly wonders to himself whether Angela might be nothing more than "a collection of arbitrary tastes, all promulgated with stylish absolutism...
...Angela has come to Harvard from England to relieve the boredom she feels after the collapse of her marriage "to a gaspump" (she means "oil executive' Angela has a way with words), and she catches Artie's admiring gaze during a particularly excruciating session of their English Symposium...
...The lodestar of Artie's budding climacteric, so to speak (what the hell, it's a novel about life in graduate school, a place where people talk funny) is a fellow graduate student named Angela Downing...
...By the time he starts jumping into the sack with Angela, Artie is visiting Mrs...
...Artie turns crimson, and looks up to see Angela lazily smiling at him...
...exams...
...She is also totally self-possessed and brilliant: Artie knows of her brilliance "from hearing her speak in the seminar in seventeenth-century poetry they were both in...
...W ithin a few weeks they are frequently sharing Angela's "forty-nine feet square" bed in Angela's posh apartment (she's rich too, this nerd's dream-girl), after cutting a deal to share the burden of the reading list for the spring M.A...
...But after acing the M.A...
...She sounds like a potential dragon lady...
...He loves old movies and hard work...
...As for your own chick, this Downing job," Shane writes from California, "I don't know, Urn Man...
...He is therefore alone and lonely in Comus Hall, a graduate residence populated by borderline psychopaths of the sort one with greater academic experience than John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...
...Crangel at the clinic regularly, and we get our first hint of what's really going on between Artie and Angela when Angela, out of character, betrays a touch of jealousy about this other woman in whom Artie confides...
...So Angela dumps him and takes up with another gas pump...
...Just so...
...She hates American literature, loves medieval literature and American television, hates Harvard, loves pulling pranks on bloodless professors and their student toadies...
...Artie's would naturally expect to find in such quarters—including, for example, the inevitable lifer M.S...
...Thomas Mallon's first novel—tightly plotted, witty, good humored, full of good sentiment, utterly unsentimental—puts him in debt to his readers...
...it would have to be a study "of frustration so exquisite, so ineffable, nobody could describe it...
...The trouble is, at age 21 and into the first month of his first semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Artie still is . . . well, a kid...
...its and Sciences is neatly bracketed, fore and aft, with two appearances by another important character, Artie's best friend from his undergraduate years at Brown University, Joseph Abbott Manningham, Jr., who goes by the nickname Shane...
...exams...
...Several years ago—in fact, the very year (1973) in which the plot of Thomas Mallon's first novel begins to unfold—Tom Wolfe wrote an, essay on "The New Journalism," wherein occurs a passing retrospective on Wolfe's five years in graduate school...
...Shane (remember the movie...
...He owes them a sequel...
...With Arts and Sciences Thomas Mallon has described to a tee the indescribable, demonstrating that he is a can-do, take-charge kind of guy, despite a close biographical and physical resemblance between himself and the central character, Arthur V. Dunne...
...Then there's graduate school itself, gray and desiccated and not too damn friendly, a place where it is "impolitic" not to attend certain parties and where departmental politics are "a substitute for sex and family...
...The thought has already occurred to Artie (months before, at about Thanksgiving time) that he knows Angela chiefly by her tastes...
...A second hint comes later, when the normally unvexed Angela gives into a brief fit of genuine rage...
...But Artie's new-found sexual prowess doesn't help much with the "disaster demons" now inside him—those intermittent, barely controllable urges he feels to wreak petty destruction on his surroundings: Suppose I just ripped up that Herbert manuscipt At the student clinic, he has taken the story of his demons to Mrs...
...Now, Mrs...
...ARTS AND SCIENCES: A SEVENTIES SEDUCTION Thomas Mallon/Ticknor & Fields-Houghton Mifflin/$16.95 John R. Dunlap 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988...
...And, as we leave him to enjoy his first glow of adult achievement, we are given to know that Artie's chances with Angela will depend very seriously on whether he will be man enough to love his Keats more than his professional success...
...candidate who, in 1973, still plugs away at a dissertation begun during the Truman Administration...
...So percipient, so unvexed, so tall...
...I mean, he reads books because he wants to...
...About a head taller than Artie, in fact, and seven years older...
...She is a beautiful Briton, with cornsilk hair and long legs and freckles...
...Artie is a neurasthenic twit who—short, bespectacled, and weighing all of 113 pounds—comes off as a cross between Woody Allen and Freddie Bartholomew...
...Bewildered, Artie turns all his energy to a fierce bout of final preparation for the M.A...
...I'd advise you to keep your little ceramic ass covered...
...Crangel has already referred jauntily to Angela as a "bitch," an observation which makes Artie wince but has not clicked with him...
...Such a novel couldn't happen...
...Crangel, a fortyish counseling psychologist "comfortable inside her own skin" and gifted with an ironic sense of the inexactness of her science...
...You see, he has entered a graduate English program for an awfully naive reason: he truly loves literature...
...Well, scratch that literary judgment...
...Crangel speculates that Artie's nightmare demons "are really just little substitutes for big questions, real ones, that you're afraid to ask...
...Crangel thus knows something Artie still has to learn: that female bitchiness is directly proportionate to male obtuseness...
...Late in the second semester, however, when Angela suddenly asks Artie what sort of person he thinks she is and Artie responds that he has no idea, Angela shouts: "Well, why don't you make some fucking effort to find out...
...Actually, Artie's a pretty neat kid...
...Amid such chilly circumstances, and still just a kid (a nice Catholic boy, by the way—if not precisely Catholic in orthodox detail, at least residually Catholic in the appurtenances of whispered Hail Marys, a simple decency, and a prodigiously nagging conscience), Artie begins to feel himself coming unhinged...
...Which places something of a burden on Artie's creator as well...
...the impeccably crafted 1953 George Stevens western, with Alan Ladd as the archetypal drifter and Brandon de Wilde as the 11year-old boy who adores him...
...Artie, who cut his literary teeth on Keats, has little patience with Pope's "neo-classical fortune cookies" served up in "those awful ten-syllable corsets...
...Why couldn't he be more like her...
...exams, after nine months of unremitting anguish and toil, Artie feels a strange confidence that pulls him enough out of himself to see things anew—to see, for instance, the fear he had never noticed before in Shane's eyes, or the tender need behind Angela's imperious talent and superficial buoyancy...
...But in the same paragraph Wolfe denies the possibility of what half the students he met in graduate school swore they would do: write a novel about it...
...The topic is Alexander Pope...
...Artie, much less disposed now to cover his ass, may have another chance with Angela...
...Artie (Shane calls him "Urn Man") is in awe of Shane's worldly wisdom and seeks out Shane's advice whenever possible...
...No way—the topic "defied literary exploitation...
...is a druggie and a drifter, left over from the counterculture of the sixties and not much interested in the "yuppie stirrings" of the seventies...
...He is struggling to keep such thoughts to himself when a note penned by Angela arrives from across the room: Of the twelve men who this stuffy room fill, Two I'd like to screw, three I'd like to kill...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
