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Thomas Mallon's new book, The Very Heart of It, is a collection of diary entries that chart his arrival in AIDS-plagued New York City and the beginning of his career as a critic, essayist, and novelist. Below, he names six favorite books from the same 1983–94 period.
'Home Ground' by Lynn Freed (1986)
Freed, who died in May, was the greatest South African writer of her generation, and Home Ground is her most autobiographical novel. Her characters were always amazingly alive as individuals, and not mere political abstractions. Buy it here.
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'Mustang Sally' by Edward Allen (1992)
We're all rooting for universities now as they resist Trump's mad predations, but Allen's hilarious, poignant novel reminds us of how much self-inflicted sickness they've been enduring for more than 30 years. Its English-professor hero, a schlubby American Lucky Jim, runs afoul of policed language, smug groupthink, and what was only starting to be called political correctness. Buy it here.
'Rain or Shine' by Cyra McFadden (1986)
This reminiscence of an itinerant childhood in the American West, by the daughter of a rodeo announcer and onetime vaudeville dancer, manages to be both wistful and clear-eyed. The author's parents finally went their separate ways, providing the author with stepparents to observe with equal acuity and style. Buy it here.
'Providence' by Geoffrey Wolff (1986)
A crackerjack crime novel wrapped around Rhode Island's once dull capital city, which in the '80s was still awaiting its transformation into something almost fabulous. The novel is lively and propulsive, but you'll remember it for its exactitude and social texture. Buy it here.
'A Different Person' by James Merrill (1993)
This memoir chronicles the poet's mid-20s in the early 1950s. A child of wealth, he recalls his true and false starts in romance, psychotherapy, and literature, in a narrative that wanders Europe and, whenever it pleases the author, makes compelling, italicized flights into his own future. Buy it here.
'Remembering Denny' by Calvin Trillin (1993)
Along with future firebrand Larry Kramer, Yale's Class of 1957 contained Denny Hansen, a golden-boy swimmer-scholar who in those days might have been voted "Least Likely to be Gay." Except that he was. Trillin was also a member of that class, and Remembering Denny is his meditative investigation of the depressed life that led Hansen to suicide in 1991. Buy it here.
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A little-visited Indian Ocean archipelago
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