Mallon has managed to capture the all of it: the tragic and mundane, the petty and comically absurd lurking in even the weightiest moments of the past. Turns out that all along in his diaries, Mallon was simultaneously doing the same for his own life and times. Even in entries for spring of 1984, when testing positive for AIDS was largely regarded as a death sentence and Mallon is mourning the death of a beloved whom, he fears, may have infected him, his wit refuses to wither away ... Mallon is well aware he's one of the lucky ones and his life's great luck is also ours, his readers.
Is it possible to be kind, sensible, polite, well-adjusted and cheerful, and keep a diary that’s worth anyone’s time? That’s the question that confronts the reader of The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994, by the gifted but ultra-earnest novelist and critic Thomas Mallon. He’s so nice that he drives me out the window ... I hung in there with Mallon’s diaries, and they (sort of) softened me up ... His diaries capture the youthful mood of a certain period in New York City, because he’s a careful observer and because his naïveté is sometimes winning, in the manner of a pensive number in a Sondheim musical about a new kid in town. Every writer probably needs a bit of this quality to see the world plain.
I read the whole thing, all 567 pages of Thomas Mallon’s The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994, which surprised me, because once I got past the parts that I was in some way witness to, as a student of Mallon’s at Vassar College in the 1980s, I had expected to skim. I tried to skim. But the skimming never lasted long ... Mallon is, among other things, a master of the bitchy aperçu and the briskly summarizing detail. He is a gossip of the highest order ... Mallon is a keen observer of not just himself but of his contemporaries, stray encounters on the street or in late-night bars, and the political scene ... In his hands, keeping a diary isn’t so much an act of introspection or reflection as it is an act of discipline. It’s a kind of apple-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away approach, which is to say one anecdote, one image or snippet of dialogue, one colorful zinger per entry. There is a thrill in getting a contemporaneous account of those years, but what makes the book sing is the voice: smart, attuned to the specific, delightfully and relentlessly snide. That last quality, consumed in such abundance, left this reader feeling slightly queasy, but I was nonetheless ready to accompany Mallon wherever he went.
