Prohibition-era novel swings, swigs, smokes

By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times book critic

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Over the past 10 years, novelist-critic Thomas Mallon has put a stamp all his own on the American historical novel. In "Henry and Clara," he probed the fate of history's bystanders (here, the couple who accompanied the Lincolns to the theater on the night of the assassination). In "Two Moons," he served up brainy repartee and soulful poignancy as he portrayed a Civil War widow's unlikely romances in 1870s Washington, D.C.

Both books — along with "Dewey Defeats Truman" — were as stately in pace as they were eccentric in vantage point. "Two Moons," which as its title suggests had a cosmic angle, might even be called symphonic.

Not so Mallon's latest novel. In this Prohibition-era romp, the rhythms are frantic, the action is farcical and most of the characters are as hopped up on illicit booze, sex and/or cocaine as they can get. No one does the Charleston in "Bandbox" — but they do just about everything else, and in every combination possible. The result is a hooch-swigging, cigar-chomping rat-a-tat-tap-dance of a novel.

The setting is Manhattan, the year is 1928, and the focus is on a rivalry between two men's magazines viciously vying for readers.

"Bandbox" by Thomas Mallon Pantheon, $24.95

In one corner we have Bandbox, under the editorship of 60-year-old Jehoshaphat Harris (nicknames: "Joe," "Phat"). In another we have Cutaway, the brainchild of a Harris protégé-turned-turncoat who's giving his former employer some serious competition.

Bandbox's problems start with the disappearance of its male-model cover boy Waldo Lindstrom, "an omnisexual cocaine addict" who stays missing in action for long stretches of the book (Mallon refrains from overt "Where's Waldo?" jokes). But the magazine's woes don't stop there.

Circulation is down. A fiction contest has turned into a plagiarism scandal. A photo purporting to show how much child murderers Leopold and Loeb love Bandbox has to be quashed. A plan to feature a female on the cover for the first time — Hollywood siren Rosemary LeRoche — looks shaky due to the unpredictable nature of the oversexed Miss LeRoche's "glandular beck and call."

Within the ranks, a couple of key reporters are threatening to fall off the wagon and go on benders. And Italian restaurateur Gianni Roma, Harris's most reliable Scotch provider, is about to get in trouble with the law.

These aren't the only pressures on Harris, however. As a veteran magazine man, he's having trouble keeping pace with the 1920s themselves. "It must be fascinating," one character remarks, "to produce a magazine about all that's new and unusual in this hundred-mile-an-hour world of ours."

Fascinating, maybe — but also fatiguing.

Mallon tosses us into this hectic world without much more mercy than he shows Harris. Characters come flying past you, mouthing wisecracks, in short, snappy chapters that are almost gone before they're here. Real-life characters — publisher Horace Liveright, New York's Mayor Walker — flutter along the periphery of the narrative like so many pennants from the top of a speeding Model T.

These frenzied proceedings are spiced with several offbeat romances, the sweetest being between boozer-reporter Cuddles Houlihan and his ambitious colleague Becky Walter (never mind that she has a medievalist boyfriend specializing in Scottish Chaucerians). None of them induces quite the heartbreak that "Two Moons" did. But, then, this is a different kind of book.

"Bandbox" also features a classic, Manhattan-smitten greenhorn — from, appropriately enough, Greencastle, Ind. — whose unexpected adventures, following his arrival at the magazine's doorstep, prove pivotal to the plot.

Throughout all these shenanigans, Mallon draws droll parallels with our own recent experience of stock-market bubbles and bewildering entertainment-media developments. Where today's aging journalists have trouble figuring out what the heck blogs, iPods and TiVos are, Harris' problems are with music that "played so fast you couldn't follow it" and talking pictures that are just one more thing to keep track of in "the age of You've Heard Too Much Already."

Mallon's period detail — with its Damon Runyon-like razzle-dazzle — is mostly spot-on. The one anachronism I caught: The Cloisters, where Becky's medievalist boyfriend works, didn't open until 1938. Also, a few of Mallon's touches feel a bit obvious: Bandbox's owner being named Oldcastle, for instance, to contrast with that greenhorn's Greencastle, Ind.

But these are minor glitches in an energetic book that shows Mallon trying something new and pulling it off with a positively jitterbug-worthy aplomb.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company