Bandbox, by Thomas Mallon (Pantheon, 306 pp., $24.95)
Time travel is the pornography of eggheads. What reasonably well-read person wouldn’t jump in the Wayback Machine if he could? You don’t have to be a science-fiction geek to wonder what the day before yesterday looked and smelled and tasted like. Small wonder, then, that filmmakers love to turn back the clock, though they tend not to do it especially well, getting the surface spectacularly right (the best thing about Hollywood is its art directors) and the substance hopelessly wrong. For that, one must go to novelists, who don’t have to stay up late worrying about how to make a city block look exactly the way it did in 1952. Instead, they can concentrate on the small stuff ó the way people talked and thought ó and when it comes to the past, the small stuff is the big stuff.
Thomas Mallon, an ardent novelistic time traveler, has set his Wayback Machine to 1928 for Bandbox, the soufflÈ-light tale of a popular magazine of the Roaring Twenties whose motto is “a sound mind in a sound body in a good suit.” He is, as usual, perfectly sound on the small stuff. In the first 20 pages alone, he makes accurate and unostentatious reference to pneumatic tubes, six-dollar quarts of hooch, Leopold and Loeb, camel-hair coats, radio stock, Arnold Rothstein, the old Vanity Fair, Ruth Snyder, Christy Mathewson, and Horace Liveright. Every once in a while the mask slips a quarter-inch or so (I don’t think the word “butch” acquired its current slang meaning until somewhat later), and Mallon doesn’t lay on the period detail quite so thickly as did, say, Frederick Turner in 1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age, but for the most part you’ll rattle along quite comfortably in his hand-built Duesenberg, taking in the painted scenery and marveling at how real the props look.
Needless to say, accurate period detail alone does not a readable novel make, and Mallon has set himself a considerable challenge in writing about journalism. In the insufficiently remembered words of Harold Ross, who knew a thing or two about what it was like to put out a magazine in the Twenties, “Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer.” The good news is that Mallon steers well away from this particular Slough of Despond, using his characters’ richly varied problems as fodder for knockabout comedy. The protagonist of Bandbox, Jehoshaphat “Joe” Harris, is an aging editor whose once-hot book (as they say in the magazine biz) is under siege from Jimmy Gordon, a disloyal protÈgÈ who now edits a clothes-and-prose monthly of his own. Not surprisingly, Bandbox turns out to be staffed by a gaggle of loonies who can barely manage to get up in the morning, much less make their deadlines, and the fight to the finish between Bandbox and Cutaway ends up being fought not with pistols for two but cream pies and pratfalls.
To disclose the details would be to diminish the delight, so I’ll keep them to myself, save to say that Calvin Coolidge has a very funny walk-on and that the forces of journalistic good (so to speak) triumph in the end. Nor do I care to ape today’s let-it-all-hang-out movie trailers by previewing Mallon’s sharpest punch lines, since half the fun of Bandbox, if not more, is to be found in the dryly amused way that the author tells his inconsequential tale. (Okay, here’s a taste. Did you hear the one about the article so full of similes that the editor “was moved to ask whether it was a story or a reversible raincoat”?) Besides, that’s the easy part. Any competent writer with a sense of humor and access to an adequately stocked library could write a halfway-decent farce about life in the Jazz Age. Instead, Thomas Mallon has done something subtler, asking a question that could only have occurred to a perceptive novelist: What might it have felt like to be middle-aged in the Twenties?
Poor Joe Harris, for instance, is all too clearly clinging to the fast-changing zeitgeist by the skin of his fingernails:
Harris sighed, recalling the days of his youth, the long-ago eighties and nineties, an era before big trenchermen had ever heard of exercise and before bosoms had deflated to the pitiful boyish protuberances on modern girls like Hazel Snow. He closed his eyes and, for a few seconds, took himself back to summer nights alive with the tootlings of oompah bands instead of the discordant, mystifying notes of jazz; to the orating politician’s thrilling cry for free silver instead of Everyman’s current pursuit of ubiquitous easy money.
Nor is he the only character to feel time flying. Daisy DiDonna, for instance, is a fortysomething temptress well on the way to her sell-by date:
She sighed, remembering her own first job, typing away inside the Flatiron Building in 1903, the year it opened. Outside at lunchtime, on the sidewalks, men would come from blocks around to gawk at the girls, when the downdrafts created by the building’s peculiar shape blew their long skirts up over their thighs. . . . It had been Daisy’s misfortune to waste her own legs’ best days in the era of ankle-length dresses. Now, when her stems lacked the supreme tautness they’d once had, skirts had risen right to the knees. She needed the next gust of wind to send her somebody truly well-heeled–and to blow her eyes shut against whatever farm-fresh boy she could see over his shoulder.
Put that in a movie.
Perhaps not surprisingly, passages such as these put me in mind of H. L. Mencken, the shiv-waving scourge of the Jazz Age, in private life a jazz-hating Victorian whose best book, Happy Days, was a blissful memoir of his Baltimore youth. Who would have thought it? Thomas Mallon, I suspect. The old quip notwithstanding, he knows that nostalgia is exactly what it used to be, and that knowledge is what gives this well-whipped meringue its peculiar sweetness. Profound it isn’t, but if you want to be diverted by a smart writer who knows what it means to be serious, you won’t do much better than Bandbox.
–Mr. Teachout, the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the music critic of Commentary, is the author of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken and A Terry Teachout Reader (forthcoming from Yale University Press).