Mallon on His Novel

The Great American Novel--it may be the dream of every English professor to write it. And although Thomas Mallon, a teacher at Vassar for the past nine years, would scarely call his first fictional work such a novel, he says the motivation is much the same.

Mallon says every English teacher harbors a desire to write creatively, perhaps because they are closer to their critical subject than other scholars, since they are writing about other people's writing.

"One wants to try what one's been writing about," says Mallon, who says his study at Harvard helped prepare him for novel writing because "it encouraged us to write in a way that avoided the worst excesses of academic jargon."

Born in Long Island and educated at Brown before coming to graduate school here, Mallon agrees that his novel is popular fiction because its goal is to entertain. But, he says, "there is a sort of literacy involved" in understanding the novel, which is filled with literary and political allusions.

But Arts and Sciences stems from more than a critic's desire to be a writer. The book was written in "the aftermath of an unhappy love affair to cheer myself up," Mallon says. One of its main themes is the protagonists inability to cope with their feelings about each other and their affair.

Though he says his mother and his students refuse to believe that the novel's main character, Artie, and his love affair with a British beauty are not strictly autobiographical, he explains that he gave his characters "bits and pieces of different people's resumes. "Until I wrote this novel, I didn't believe in composite characters," says Mallon.

Mallon not only learned about writing with this project; he learned about being read. "I am very distrustful of authorial intention," he says, adding that one reviewer of Arts and Sciences wrote that he probably meant the protagonist's name to be a pun on the word art in the title. "But I named him for my father," he says.

Mallon, who wrote two non-fiction works before publishing his novel, says fiction writing is not a planned process because things "just sailed into my head." Mallon says he likes to describe fiction writing as "like cooking in Warsaw--whatever you can scrape up out of your mind."

But to Mallon, the most important misconception scholars have about fiction writing is the notion of "the agony of writing."

"It's very overrated," the author-scholar says, adding that writing fiction is "infinitely easier than nonfiction." Calling it "entertaining to create little adventures, not to have to pay fidelity to truth," he says he had fun writing the book.

In fact, Mallon says he never intended to be realistic about things. He changed building and course names to suit his plot and intentionally made his characters "cartoonish." And he says he was amused when he visited his publisher's office and saw the copy editor use a map of Harvard to assure that the characters did not cross imaginary intersections.

The exaggeration and somewhat cavalier regard for reality that Mallon displays in Arts and Sciences help to brighten a novel with a potentially depressing theme. Mallon says his novel is "really intended as light entertainment." "There's a great element of silliness in the book," but that "does seem to go along with the territory."

Mallon says he had not visited Harvard since his graduation in 1978 at the time he wrote the novel but relied entirely on memory for his description He says he is currently working on a book about the history of plagiarism and has begun "nibbling" on a novel based on his childhood.