DEWEY DEFEATS MALLON

In these summer and fall months of 1948, World War II remains a searing reality as battlefield dead continue to be returned to their homes for reburial. Between the lingering and raw experience of the war and the expectations of a vibrant postwar America, Mallon weaves his tale of Owosso and a handful of its residents. The novel pivots around an engaging young trio: Anne Macmurray, pert and eager to mine the town for a novel; ex-G.I. Jack Riley, a UAW organizer and one of the few Truman supporters in Owosso; and Peter Cox, a selfassured Navy veteran and lawyer intent on a political career without delay as a Republican.

In Mallon’s fiction — notably Aurora 7, which takes place in and around New York City during the single day in 1962 on which Scott Carpenter completed three orbital flights in his Mercury capsule — time is the palpable and figuring element. Here Horace Sinclair, a widowed veteran of the SpanishAmerican war, guiltily guards a long-held secret of his and the town’s. Sinclair, Mallon writes, “knew that living in the past demanded much more effort than living in the here and now. As it receded ever further, the past required more and more work for a man to keep up with it, ever greater imaginative stamina to keep chasing it down the tracks.”

Dewey Defeats Truman is an attempt to write an affectionate novel about a small town with unexpected heroes — the Republican politician turns out to be a deeper-souled man than the labor organizer — and unexpected harmonies — the secret lover of a soldier dead in the war finds a way out of his lonely trap through the agency of his beloved’s obsessive-compulsive mother. But while the novel holds interest, it ambles toward its conclusion, more admirable for what it could have been than what it is. And there are moments at which Malloh’s knowing gestures toward the reader — an out-of-context discussion of a rising young congressman named Nixon, for example — suggest the dangers of writing historical fiction without perfect pitch.

But the novel’s central notion — portraying an obscure town that feels itself on the verge of a greatness we know it will never achieve — is well- wrought. The old veteran and much of Owosso are agitated by an idea proposed by a local go-getter for “Dewey Walk” — a primitive diorama/theme park along the bank of the Shiawassee River. The project will commemorate the early life and career of “President Dewey” (who long ago departed Owosso, leaving only a reclusive mother) and attract tourists and the economic benefits.

The decision whether to plunge for the Dewey Walk and presumably change the placid old town becomes a symbol for decisions in Anne Macmurray’s own life, as she works in the town bookstore while collecting material for a novel that may never get written. She is being avidly pursued by Jack Riley, the unpolished (but sexy) union organizer, and Peter Cox, both devilishly handsome, moneyed, and arrogant. Despite his progressivism, Riley represents a settled and predictable future in Owosso, while a life with Cox will lead to more adventurous and far less steady years ahead.

As she juggles the two wooers, she tries to make up her mind about the riverside enterprise and finally decides she’s for the Dewey Walk. “I like it because it’s peculiar; it’ll be one of a kind, not something from a chain store. They say the future will be places like that ready-made town they’re going to put on a potato farm outside New York — each house like every other. . . . If Owosso is the place that produced Dewey, at least it’s the only place that produced him.”

It’s a rare novel that regards a commercial development with such equanimity.

Woody West is associate editor of the Washington Times.