From Publishers Weekly
McCarthy-era Washington, D.C., is as twisted and morally compromised as a noir Los Angeles in Mallon's latest, a wide-ranging examination of betrayal and clashing ideologies. The young ladies in the secretary pool are agog over dapper bureaucrat Hawkins Fuller, though his attentions covertly focus on newly minted Fordham graduate and good Catholic Tim Laughlin. Hawkins helps Tim land a job and, after feeling out the impressionable young man, makes a place in his bed for him. Mary Johnson, a friend to both closeted men, watches with rising alarm as Tim and Hawkins carry on their affair and Washington seethes in paranoia over Communists and "sexual deviation." Mary, meanwhile, succumbs to her own lustful yearnings and has an affair with a married businessman, leading to a predictable, though deftly played, quandary. The District's social milieu is solidly realized, with such period icons as Mary McGrory and Drew Pearson in evidence alongside political heavyweights—McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon and the like. Less convincing, however, is the on-again-off-again and largely one-sided relationship between Washington greenhorn Tim and cold, calculating careerist Hawkins. Mallon (
Bandbox;
Dewey Defeats Truman) offers an intricate, fluent and divergent perspective on a D.C. rife with backstabbing and power grabbing.
(May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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*Starred Review* The writer of accomplished historical novels such as
Henry and Clara (1994) and
Bandbox (2004) patiently develops a story of love and politics set in the mid-1950s. As the cold war rages abroad, within the District of Columbia, the McCarthy subcommittee on "un-American activities" rages against suspected Communists--and homosexuals--within the federal government and the army, determined to weed out those two groups, which, by the subcommittee's definition, are enemies of the state. It is the latter category into which the novel's chief protagonist falls. Tim Laughlin is a recent college graduate and a new employee in the office of a U.S. senator. He takes a hard fall for an older man, a devastatingly handsome and charming State Department official. With his usual elan--his thorough study of a past era and place standing strongly behind him--Mallon evokes these sociopolitical times as Tim and his lover, the cloak-and-dagger-minded Hawkins Fuller, carry out their tortured affair amid the tortured climate of McCarthy-era Washington. Published at a time when the administration currently in office values secrecy, and gay rights remains an unsettled issue, this layered novel about who has what on whom is relevant to our times as well.
Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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