Looking Backward

...General Pershing's death...

...Readers who, like several of the characters and your reviewer, cast their first vote in 1948, should have their own special memories stirred...

...Whit-taker Chambers...

...Jack has been around, too, but in shabbier precincts...

...The enlightened and otherwise admirable Anne is taken with The Naked and the Dead and proves it by telling somebody, "Fug you...

...But Jane Austen seems to have had more influence on her...

...Yet they are camouflaged with a lot of period-setting name-dropping: Rain-tree County...

...Billy figuring out a million schemes for making a fortune...

...The novel is thoroughly persuasive about the era, particularly as experienced by the characters in their teens and 20s who are about to slip or burst into brave new America...

...Even cocky Peter Cox is wryly aware of his own superficiality...

...Tim's mother, Jane, the strangest yet a strangely understandable character in a book rich in provincial characters, ignores Tim and the rest of the world in her grief for her older son Arnie, killed in the War...

...Carol Landis' suicide...

...He has a light touch, knowing yet not judgmental, exactly right for a tale about young people looking hopefully ahead to a spacious tomorrow even as they try to locate themselves in the narrow confine of their day's Owosso, which may be heaven or just a trap: Jack dreaming about a home...

...Naturally...

...Anne excepted, there are no heroes here, and nobody who approaches villainy...

...the babies of another time, dead the year they were born...

...the Louis-Walcott fight...

...In a passage that reflects the book's spirit, she finds herself in the cemetery: "She looked away for a second, back toward all the rows of headstones, newly carved or weatherbeaten: the men and women mated for life and now eternity...

...One hometowner reminisces that as a lad the candidate "used to charge his mother a quarter to mow the lawn...

...Sheis making her own way and trying to write a novel entitled The Time Being...

...This pitchman's descendants are no doubt now building theme parks...

...She is liberated, within reason...

...One of them, of course, was the election...

...And then there is crotchety Horace Sinclair, a Spanish-American War cavalryman, whose long-kept secret involving a suicide a half century ago is threatened by a promoter who plans to dig up the town's waterfront and turn it into Dewey Walk in honor of the man everyone expects to be the first President from Owosso...

...Anne awaiting marvels yet unknown...

...Jane's love for her killed son has turned into an obsession with all the soldiers and sailors shipped home for burial or reburial in the old town cemetery...

...There's nothing wrong with this place," Anne says, even though it is impossible to imagine her staying there for long...

...Though Mallon is careful not to come down too heavily on the matter, for all its easy charm his book has an undercurrent of early death and irretrievable loss...

...the boys who'd gone down into the ground, for a second time, as Jane Herrick listened to 'Taps...

...the arrival of the Polaroid camera...

...And the Thomas E. Dewey-Harry S. Truman campaign serves as the occasion for a story that runs from the nominations of June to the November vote...

...Anne is sexually venturesome yet not promiscuous, self-controlled yet willing at the right moment to go all the way, as they used to say when going part way was more common than it has become...

...Seventeen-year-old Billy Grimes, a natural-born go-getter (with a little inspiration from Dale Carnegie), who is sure to make a fortune in go-get-it postwar America, has a crush on beautiful Margaret Feller, who falls for Billy's best friend, Tim Herrick, a visionary or maybe just an unhappy youth, who decides one night to disappear from the world...

...Nor does Mallon neglect the changes that would soon play havoc with small-town life, the 1950s famously being the decade of automobiles, highways and ranch houses...

...Reviewed by Walter Goodman Thomas Mallon's engaging new novel brings memories of Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters, of Booth Tar-kington and John Updike and J. D. Salinger and other chroniclers of growing up or growing old in small-town America...

...Their small circle is completed when he tells Jane, "We're alone in this town, and this is a hard place to be alone...

...Margaret, like Anne, has romantic longings, but of a more adolescent sort: "If he kissed her again, she would break the sound barrier, fly involuntarily over that threshold they were always hinting at in Girl s Health, the one past which she wouldn't be able to control herself...

...The author, a sometime English professor and now a magazine editor, has written three novels that, to my loss, escaped my attention...

...he's a fast worker with the ladies...

...the dozens of men who, right in this town, had built the caskets they lay in...

...The place is Owosso, Michigan, population 16,000which readers may be pardoned for not remembering was the birthplace of the dimly remembered Dewey, and in 1948 still home to his mother...

...With a sympathetic eye for hometown oddities and an easy narrative way, Mallon moves these folks more or less smoothly among one another as the Presidential campaign heats up...

...You can't even work up much annoyance for Al Jackson, the salesman on the verge of becoming one of the developers who already in 1948 were conspiring in the destruction of communities everywhere...

...Mai Ion, who says he was lured on by the "historical tragicomedy" of Owos-so's fate, concedes in an author's note that he has taken liberties with history...

...His Owos-soians keep revealing surprising and generally likable qualities...

...Anne Macmur-ray, described early as "the dishy girl from Abner's Bookstore," has to choose between Jack Riley, a War veteran, United Auto Workers organizer and Truman supporter, and the town's golden-haired lad, the pushy Peter Cox, a Dewey man who is running for State Senator...

...Mallon demonstrates that well after Main Street has given way to shopping malls, looking backward can still yield home truths...

...Peter, from a rich, socially elevated if brittle family, has been around...

...At the center of the tale is a pleasantly old-fashioned triangle...

...Tim dreaming of escape, by plane or bottle...

...Owosso, after all, was once the coffin capital of the region, and powerful memories are buried in products of the Owosso casket company...

...There is no shortage in Mallon's Owosso of boosters and eccentrics who are living out their own dramas...

...H. V. Kaltenborn...

...Even Anne, uninfatuated with death, is touched by Owosso's elegiac appeal...

...Peter plotting politics...

...Born Yesterday...

...She was stroking his hair, pulling on his ears, and not doing anything to stop his hands...

...long-lived maiden aunts buried with their parents, the dates so strangely aligned it took a visitor a few seconds to sort out the blood ties...

...The title, of course, is borrowed from the Chicago Tribune's premature ejaculation on November 3,1948...

...That's about as hot as the sex scenes get...

...Anne is perfect from start to end, intelligent, emotionally open and never more appealing than when she is confused by her own feelings...

...Tim finds affectionate attention from a high school science teacher, Peter Sherwood, a homosexual several decades too early, who also grieves privately for Arnie...

...She seeks consolation in numerology...

...At moments the story slows and seems slight, but it is sustained by the telling, by the author's success in evoking Owos-so and by his abiding sympathy for the town and its residents...

...It gives nothing away to report that despite its premonition of Owosso's decline, Dewey Defeats Truman ends with a batch of happy endings...

...Not that there is anything imitative here...

...She views Owosso at a novelist's remove as "exactly the sort of town artists fled from" but finds herself caught up in the community excitement over the native son, whom she privately ridicules...