Dewey Defeats Mallon
WEST, WOODY
Dewey Defeats Mallon The Pol's Hometown, Vivid but Insubstantial By Woody West In Thomas Mallon's fourth novel, it is June 1948 in Owosso, Mich., the comfortable and stable hometown of Thomas E....
...Dewey Defeats Mallon The Pol's Hometown, Vivid but Insubstantial By Woody West In Thomas Mallon's fourth novel, it is June 1948 in Owosso, Mich., the comfortable and stable hometown of Thomas E. Dewey, whose next stop will be the White House— or such is the widely shared assumption...
...it'll be one of a kind, not something from a chain store...
...I like it because it's peculiar...
...But the novel's central notion— portraying an obscure town that feels itself on the verge of a greatness we know it will never achieve—is well-wrought...
...Between the lingering and raw experience of the war and the expectations of a vibrant postwar America, Mallon weaves his tale of Owosso and a handful of its residents...
...The old veteran and much of Owosso are agitated by an idea proposed by a local go-getter for "Dewey Walk"—a primitive diorama/theme park along the bank of the Shiawassee River...
...Dewey Defeats Truman is an attempt to write an affectionate novel about a small town with unexpected heroes—the Republican politician turns out to be a deeper-souled man than the labor organizer—and unexpected harmonies—the secret lover of a soldier dead in the war finds a way out of his lonely trap through the agency of his beloved's obsessive-compulsive mother...
...The novel pivots around an engaging young trio: Anne Macmurray, pert and eager to mine the town for a novel...
...Here Horace Sinclair, a widowed veteran of the Spanish-American war, guiltily guards a long-held secret of his and the town's...
...It's a rare novel that regards a commercial development with such equanimity...
...They say the future will be places like that ready-made town they're going to put on a potato farm outside New York—each house like every other...
...Woody West is associate editor of the Washington Times...
...ex-G.I...
...As it receded ever further, the past required more and more work for a man to keep up with it, ever greater imaginative stamina to keep chasing it down the tracks...
...In these summer and fall months of 1948, World War II remains a searing reality as battlefield dead continue to be returned to their homes for rebur-ial...
...As she juggles the two wooers, she tries to make up her mind about the riverside enterprise and finally decides she's for the Dewey Walk...
...3, however, Owos-so and America will awake to find that Dewey has lost—despite the famously premature headline in the first edition of the Chicago Tribune that gives Mallon his title: Dewey Defeats Truman...
...On Nov...
...The decision whether to plunge for the Dewey Walk and presumably change the placid old town becomes a symbol for decisions in Anne Macmurray's own life, as she works in the town bookstore while collecting material for a novel that may never get written...
...If Owosso is the place that produced Dewey, at least it's the only place that produced him...
...The project will commemorate the early life and career of "President Dewey" (who long ago departed Owosso, leaving only a reclusive mother) and attract tourists and the economic benefits...
...In Mallon's fiction—notably Aurora 7, which takes place in and around New York City during the single day in 1962 on which Scott Carpenter completed three orbital flights in his Mercury capsule—time is the palpable and figuring element...
...Despite his progressivism, Riley represents a settled and predictable future in Owosso, while a life with Cox will lead to more adventurous and far less steady years ahead...
...And there are moments at which Mallon's knowing gestures toward the reader—an out-of-context discussion of a rising young congressman named Nixon, for example—suggest the dangers of writing historical fiction without perfect pitch...
...But while the novel holds interest, it ambles toward its conclusion, more admirable for what it could have been than what it is...
...Sinclair, Mallon writes, "knew that living in the past demanded much more effort than living in the here and now...
...Jack Riley, a UAW organizer and one of the few Truman supporters in Owosso...
...The election of Harry Truman is regarded as so unlikely as not to be reasonably considered...
...She is being avidly pursued by Jack Riley, the unpolished (but sexy) union organizer, and Peter Cox, both devilishly handsome, moneyed, and arrogant...
...and Peter Cox, a self-assured Navy veteran and lawyer intent on a political career without delay as a Republican...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 20
