An intoxicating sip of the Roaring ‘20s

For his literary turf, Thomas Mallon has claimed neither the cataclysms nor the sweep of history but its sidebars and asterisks. His settings are recognizable periods in America’s past, and his characters are mainly products of his imagination. In a 1997 essay, Mallon proclaimed, “After two early novels rooted in personal experience, I said good-bye to myself, at least where fiction is concerned. I now prefer my books to cover parcels of geography and time that I haven’t trod with my own two feet.” In a 1992 essay, he says that “the historical novelist quickly finds that the history in which he must work is not so much a straitjacket as a chariot,” and that one turns to historical fiction not so much for explanation as for exoticism.

In his last few novels, Mallon has chosen subjects on the margins of important historical events. “Henry and Clara” focused on the engaged couple who accompanied the Lincolns to Ford’s Theatre on that fateful, fatal night in April 1865. In “Dewey Defeats Truman,” he spun a plot around entirely fictitious characters in the Republican candidate’s hometown in Owosso, Mich., to capture the months leading up to what was supposed to be Dewey’s sure-fire presidential victory in 1948.

With “Bandbox,” Mallon is up to something slightly different. Drawing on his six-year stint in the early 1990s as literary editor of GQ magazine and its battle for market share with rival publication Vanity Fair, Mallon’s new novel is a sizzling, breakneck entertainment about a knockdown, drag-out fight between two fictitious gentlemen’s magazines published in Manhattan in 1928. The closest historical turning point is the stock market crash, still a year off.

Once again, Mallon’s aims are neither costume drama nor period piece. He has chosen his era carefully: between world wars, hemlines are up with the market and inhibitions are down; Prohibition is more challenge than obstacle; Tammany Hall and organized crime have a stranglehold on politicians and the justice system, and talkies are taking over the movie industry.

Like a literary Robin Williams, Mallon alters his voice to capture the manic, syncopated rhythm of the 1920s. His prose has never been snappier. He paints an idealized, movie-inflected picture, combining multiple genres and stereotypes. The screwball sunniness of “His Girl Friday” is crossed with soused John O’Hara, echoes of “Chicago” and Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 poem, “The Wild Party” -- the inspiration for two competing eponymous New York shows in 2000.

It would take a masthead to keep straight Mallon’s outsized cast of characters. The magazine is owned by publisher Hiram “Hi” Oldcastle -- an unsubtle play on Conde Nast Chairman Si Newhouse -- and edited by veteran Jehoshaphat “Joe” Harris, who is “a great curator of his own life story.” Among his staff are mystery writer Max Stanwick, a riff repository, allured by alliteration. When “our consonantal connoisseur of crime” takes time off to write a novel, it’s a magazine mystery amusingly titled “Kill Fee.” Allen Case is “the ventriloquial vegetarian,” an animal-obsessed copy assistant who “could not only activate a writer’s verbs and resolder his infinitives; he could also, when a piece came in a few lines short, create sentences in the voice and style of whichever scribe’s prose had just crossed his desk.” David Fine pens a “column about food and drink and anything else on his disappointment-prone mind.” It’s officially called “The Groaning Board,” but is dubbed “Fine’s Whines” by his colleagues. Mallon’s book column at GQ was headed “Doubting Thomas.”

Fine is but one of the heavy imbibers on Bandbox’s staff. Everyone at the monthly is out to rescue something or someone, be it the magazine, their job, their sobriety and self-esteem, the exotic animals used in photo shoots or the kidnapped, starry-eyed reader from Indiana -- the countrywide search for whom is described as “like looking for hay in a haystack.” Out to galvanize and save the loser boozers and snare themselves simpatico mates in the bargain are two likable, hyper-competent women staffers, copy chief Nan and promoted assistant Becky. Under Becky’s sharp watch, editor Aloysius “Cuddles” Houlihan tries to “crank himself back to life” and gives up “giving up” for Lent.

Meanwhile, up four flights in the Graybar Building is Conde Nast’s Cutaway, a rival start-up by Harris’ former protege Jimmy Gordon. Gordon plays dirty, planting spies and pillaging Bandbox’s staff and advertisers. Harris fights back by taking some dizzying risks during the novel’s four-month span, which encompasses two Friday the 13ths. With typical bravado he notes, “there’s only one way to edit, and it’s not by sticking your finger into the wind. You’ve got to go by the seat of your pants, be decisive. You don’t want Hamlet for an editor. Othello -- now there’s an editor-in-chief.” The resultant plot gallops apace, bouncing “like a double-play ball from Tinkers to Evers to Chance.”

In his sixth novel, Mallon has written about what he knows firsthand: slick, high-stakes journalism, transported to a familiar Roaring ‘20s “hundred-mile-an-hour world.” His screwball comedy repartee boasts a flotilla of puns on a sparkling sea of verbal effervescence. “Bandbox” is an intoxicating bubbly that goes down easy and won’t cause hangovers. *