In which the authoress begins to plow through some of her recent reading, in hopes that some might benefit.
I’ve been reading mostly fiction this summer (the Gothic Wars book is in process – I need to get it back to the library, so maybe I’ll knock that off this weekend.), just sort of drifting around, picking books of the “new release” shelf at the library, scrounging around beach houses, looking through Book Show Booty. Two “mehs” will start us off.
First off, yes I do judge a book by its cover. At first, at least. Didn’t work this time. This one (on the new release shelf, yes), Tom Bedlam captured my attention. Ah, I thought – a modern-day picaresque type Tom Jones Dickensian tale. Might be all gender-bending and subversive and stuff, but lets take a look, shall we?
Would it have been all gender-bending and subversive. And stuff. I read the whole thing, sort of gently propelled along by mild questions about how things might turn out, but truly, in the end, this was a book I put down without thinking much more about it, without thinking I had learned anything about life or even been really entertained. A summary:

Hagen (The Laments) rolls out the entertaining epic tale of the personable protagonist Tom Bedlam, beginning in Victorian London and ending in post-WWI South Africa. Along the way, Tom survives a rowdy boarding school, studies medicine in Scotland (where he changes his name to the more proper-sounding Tom Chapel), elopes to South Africa with his professor’s daughter and fathers three daughters and a son. Tom is recruited as a battlefield surgeon during the Boer War, but the novel slows dramatically once the war is over and he settles with his family in the Johannesburg suburbs. His steady life as a surgeon and doting father dominates the story until WWI draws pacifist Tom back to London on urgent business.

There are a few moments in the book, some situations that seem as if they would work themselves out in intriguing and evocative ways…but they mostly don’t, unfortunately. There is little humor, little absurdity, and there is a curious absence of sure identity in the central character of Tom. There is something missing in him – he is at the center of the book, but somehow not – that makes him something less than memorable.  This WaPo review by the now-despised Ron Charles (despised because he wrote this piece questioning the impact of Harry Potter on reading habits) nails it for me:

All this is laid out in well-modulated chapters that are rarely disrupted by anything too outlandish, witty or engaging. We learn that women faced discrimination in the workforce. When Tom moves to South Africa to practice medicine, he’s deeply troubled by terrible racial and class divisions. He finds the Boer war brutal and senseless. “What God could permit such misery?” Tom wonders. World War I is brutal and senseless, too, and Britain’s forces are led by “a villain with the blackest heart” who perpetuates the fighting because it “keeps our economy going.” A charismatic preacher attracts a lot of gullible followers by predicting the imminent end of the world, but — surprise! — he’s really a fraud, and the end of the world and of this novel never seem to arrive.
Such are the respectable, tepid themes of Tom Bedlam. Only in the last quarter, with the birth of Tom’s son, Arthur, does the story develop some surprising complications. For one thing, the narrative breaks away periodically from its focus on Tom, and for another, the emotional range finally broadens to include some genuine passion. Although young Arthur’s attraction to the military and his adventures in France provide excitement and pathos, I suspect this will arrive too late for most readers. But if you’re, say, 150 years old and complain that they don’t write novels the way they used to, I’ve got good news.

That was a month or so ago. This past week I read Thomas Mallon’s latest, Fellow Travelers (another great cover and title, perfectly matched to the book). I’ve read a couple of Mallon’s other books – Henry and Clara was the first I encountered, and I thought it was wonderful, but the other two or three I’ve read since then haven’t captured me in the same way. This one didn’t either.
Set mostly in the late 50’s, in Washington during the McCarthy hearings, it’s the story of a young, Irish-Catholic Fordham graduate who comes to DC, gets work in a senatorial office after an internship at the Star, and then falls into a relationship with another man who works in the State Department. The McCarthy hearings, particularly the Army hearings, play a big role, and the book is just chock-full of…events. And names. And inside Washington minutiae.  
Writing historical novels is tough. You can’t start from scratch, meticulously setting the stage as if your readers are totally ingorant of the period. But, I think, to be succesful, nor can you plunge right in and assume too much knowledge. One of the flaws of this book, I think, is that Mallon presumes just a bit too much – the whole thing becomes very confusing on a regular basis throughout the book, and there are about a third too many characters for the length. And the central relationship (warning: it’s fairly graphic)…well, it’s difficult to feel any sympathy on any level for anyone. The younger man, Tim, is a total naif, and yes, he’s supposed to be sort of enslaved – I suppose that’s the point – but it gets tiresome, and while the struggles within him regarding his faith and his sexuality are well done (probably echoing Mallon’s own), it’s the only part of his character that interested me. (Although I will say, on thinking about this more, that his struggles, such as they are, have a rather 1975 feel to them, rather than 1955. I know, I wasn’t around then, but it just strikes me that as Mallon takes pains to establish Tim as rather traditionally-formed, his reflections on his personal dilemma don’t reflect the moral tone of 50’s Catholicism as precisely say, as David Lodge does in Souls and Bodies (British title: How Far Can You Go?)  As for the others, there were too many to be well drawn, probably because of all the cameos from historical characters. Again, I turn to another reviewer to help me out, this one from the Boston Globe:

Somehow, though, even with his obvious skills, and despite a nice ending, Mallon never brings the power of the story to bear. Though they’re interesting enough, his almost compulsive wanderings — Korean War atrocities, Soviet thuggishness, Catholic stridency, State Department bureaucracy — serve to dilute rather than heighten the book’s central tension. Perhaps this is because the central tension itself comes from a relationship so sad and unequal that neither gay nor straight readers are likely to be emotionally captivated.
snip
Laughlin, a devout Catholic through most of the book, brings things to life when he struggles between his faith and his body; Hawkins’s breezy wit can be amusing; and Mary Johnson, an important friend to both, is a beautifully drawn character. What dampens the fires of compassionate interest, though, is the difficulty of caring about either the self-involved, emotionally stunted, and ultimately cruel “Hawk” or the childish, blindly infatuated, pitifully passive “Skippy.”

You can read an interview with Mallon at the National Review here.