The '20s roar in raucous magazine setting

Sunday, January 11, 2004

By John Freeman

If Gore Vidal is the dean of historical fiction, then Thomas Mallon is its bespectacled archivist. His fiction sneaks beneath the shadow of 50-point news items -- Lincoln's assassination in "Henry and Clara," Dewey's defeat in "Dewey Defeats Truman" -- to reveal how history affects the lives of everyday people.

	"Bandbox: A Novel" By Thomas Mallon Pantheon ($24.95)

It's fitting, then, that Mallon's first novel to unfold in the Roaring '20s is set not around Wall Street or in a speakeasy, but deep inside the offices of a men's magazine. Bandbox is the flagship of Hiram "Hi" Oldcastle's publishing empire, its pages "a flashing nickelodeon of idealized manhood: cosmopolitan, dapper and sexy."

Most of this success owes to Joe Harris, a newspaperman who in one business quarter turned the sagging behemoth around and took it mainstream, occluding the impression that Bandbox was a magazine for gay men. As "Bandbox" opens, though, Harris faces competition in the form of former protege Jimmy Gordon and his hot new start-up, Cutaway.

Readers familiar not just with magazines but who publishes them will recognize Harris as a very thinly veiled Art Cooper, the flamboyant longtime editor of GQ who stepped down in February 2003. Like Harris, Cooper was squeezed by young Turks (such as Maxim and Details) and did not enjoy changing the magazine to keep up. Also like Harris, Cooper competed against a former staff member, David Granger, who ran Esquire.

"Bandbox" could quite easily feel like a hopeful rewriting of this history, but Mallon is too good a writer to let that happen. Instead, he uses Cooper's life as scaffolding for a fabulous, raucous whirligig of a novel that, as a bonus -- for those who miss the old GQ -- carries some revisionist restitution for Cooper. Readers will likely not only wish they could read Bandbox but also that they could work there.

They're not all nice, but Bandbox staff members are certainly colorful. There's an ambitious, doublecrossing writer nicknamed the Wood Chipper, a sozzled old editor named Cuddles, loads of comely secretaries and a crime novelist with an appetite for alliteration.

This crew speaks, drinks and parties at full tilt. The more their numbers go down, the more they booze; and the more they booze, the worse their troubles get. The wily turncoat Jimmy Gordon takes advantage of their ineptitude, poaching advertisers and writers and laying traps that cater to the weaknesses of the Bandbox staff.

The hurlyburly, devil-may-care pace of Mallon's cast makes it easy to imagine we're in New York in 1928, a setting the author depicts with breezy assurance. It is a town that beats to jazz high hats and oohs to talking movies. Charlie Chaplin is a film star; so is Garbo.

Subway workers are about to strike, and the fare is certain to go up to 7 cents. Everyone has a bootlegger as well as a bookie. The rapid ascent of skyscrapers seems a "reminder to make haste."

Mallon's prose beats out a slapstick cadence, as if the book's expository passages were not set pieces but dance numbers in a Broadway musical. At one point, Bandbox's head male model winds up in jail, and Mallon describes the scene: "A bailiff chatted up a prostitute; a numbers runner with a receding hairline loudly protested he could prove himself a juvenile; and the court reporter, who took down nothing, read last night's Graphic."

As much as Mallon puts us on the tilt-a-whirl of history, the greatest pleasures he offers are of a decidedly bookish sort. One gets a sense of the luck and sweat and principle that go into producing a magazine. And also the fun. At one point, a writer turns in an article that is "so full of similes Harris is moved to ask whether it is a story of a reversible raincoat." Harris' "two-fingered hunting and pecking was so hit-and-miss that [a secretary] had once compared it to a man's discovery of fire."

It's tempting to say that Mallon has hardly discovered fire here himself. He does not rewrite the form of a novel, nor does he filter history through a new light.

But what he does accomplish is just as impressive, perhaps more. "Bandbox" invents not just a magazine but a whole staff to run it as well. They fret and strut across this all-too-brief stage, and when the curtain finally descends, we say goodbye to them grudgingly.

John Freeman is a freelance writer in New York.

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