In Addition to History

he best part about Thomas Mallon’s 2009
takedown of Ayn Rand—a delicate evisceration,
massaged over 4,226 words in a November
edition of The New Yorker and executed
with the precision of a GPS-enabled scalpel—
is how much he earned it. The dear man forfeited
a summer to endure all 9 billion pages
(approximately) of The Fountainhead and
Atlas Shrugged, and other Randian writings,
as well, in the holy name of preparation.
Dr. Mallon is nothing if not a thorough
man, tidy and prone to cardigans, cleanliness
and teal-striped socks. A registered
(but wholly disenchanted) Republican, the
64-year-old gets his hair cut for $26 at the
Watergate barbershop, because, well, if it’s
good enough for Bob Dole, he says, it’s good
enough for him. It’s also a short walk—he
might ride his Marin bicycle if it was much
farther—from his sixth-floor Phillips Hall
office in Foggy Bottom, where he’s been an
English professor and Rate My Professor darling
since 2007.
Students vouch, with an average of 4.8
stars out of 5, for his charm, his wit, his
helpfulness, his clarity. They testify, as even
Ms. Rand might, if she were still alive, to his
dedication to knowing as much stuff as possible,
and then, if there’s time, a little more.
An essayist, a critic and a well-lauded novelist,
Dr. Mallon—who got his PhD in English
and American literature from Harvard
University in 1978—researches hard and at
length, which is how he came to write about
Ms. Rand, her philosophy of Objectivism and
what she watched on TV.
Before that New Yorker piece,
Dr. Mallon hadn’t had more than a casual
brush with Ayn Rand. He might have been
among that group that, as he wrote seven
years ago, made “their first and last trip to
Galt’s Gulch … sometime between leaving
Middle-earth and packing for college.” And he
went back only because The New Yorker paid
him to write about two Rand biographies: Ayn
Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C.
Heller, and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand
and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns.
Dr. Mallon, though, went into the dark
beyond the biographies, also trudging—
uphill (both ways), barefoot, in the snow—
through Ms. Rand’s novels, We the Living,
The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and
Ms. Rand’s nonfiction, The Romantic Manifesto:
A Philosophy of Literature and The Art
of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers.
Dr. Mallon whittled from a block of Randian
ironwood an essay that went deep on her
Russian roots and a screenwriting dalliance
in Hollywood. Dr. Mallon dug into Ms. Rand’s
personal life, her political influence and her
cult of votaries. He even mined Ms. Rand’s
Charlie’s Angels fandom for a mordant crack
about Objectivism.
In total, Dr. Mallon persevered through
more than 3,500 pages of Ayn Rand and Ayn
Rand scholarship to craft a review-essay on
two biographies, to establish gravitas and
earn these delicious cuts: Ms. Rand’s “intellectual
genre fiction puts her in the crackpot
pantheon of L. Frank Baum and L. Ron
Hubbard,” “the novel’s dialogue is never even
accidentally plausible” and “the books would
have been no more concise and no less clumsy
had she written them in Russian.”
Ariel Gonzalez—an English professor at
Miami Dade College and NPR host who has
reviewed books for The Washington Post and
The Miami Herald—described Dr. Mallon as
one of the “best book critics” in the country
because, while Dr. Mallon may not celebrate
an author’s catalog, he will most certainly
read it, even if it’s “so bad,” Dr. Mallon says, it
“just makes my head explode.”
“He writes comprehensive essay-reviews
on someone,” Mr. Gonzalez says. “That’s
something a lot of critics won’t do. He takes
the author seriously. So even if he’s criticizing
you—even if he’s attacking you—you should
at least be happy with the fact that he’s paid so
much attention to your work.”
That is what he did for 4,226 words on two
Ayn Rand biographies. Now, consider what he
might do for his own books.
THOMAS MALLON PULLED,
from the fluorescent hammerspace of his
corner office, the first four pages of Landfall,
his novel about President George W. Bush.
Dr. Mallon’s 10th novel, it’s scheduled for a
2018 release and with a chunk of it set during
Hurricane Katrina. Landfall is the final book
of the “trilogy” he never meant to write, but
Pantheon Books, his publisher since 1997, and
his agent suggested he postpone a novel centering
on Fort Sumter during the Civil War—
tentatively titled The Late Unpleasantness—
to first novelize Bush the Younger.
The “trilogy”—Dr. Mallon didn’t name it
that but he likes to use the term ironically—
covers the major Republican presidents from
the last third of the 20th century and the forward
tip of the 21st. The series started with
Richard Nixon and the PEN/Faulkner-nominated
Watergate in 2012, then Ronald Reagan
and the well-received Finale: A Novel of
the Reagan Years in 2015, and now, W. and
Landfall.
“You are the first person to read that,
besides me,” says Dr. Mallon, handing over
the pages. “It was only written in the last
couple of days.”
It’s January and the air is gloomy. The
pages are handwritten front and back in blue
roller-ball ink, ripped primly from legal pads
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