Time travel is the pornography of eggheads. What reasonably well-read person wouldn’t jump in the Way back 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—the way people talked and thought—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 souffle 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.
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