[In the following review, Goodman compliments Mallon's “engaging” prose style in Dewey Defeats Truman.]

Thomas Mallon's engaging new novel [Dewey Defeats Truman] brings memories of Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters, of Booth Tarkington and John Updike and J. D. Salinger and other chroniclers of growing up or growing old in small-town America. Not that there is anything imitative here. Mallon demonstrates that well after Main Street has given way to shopping malls, looking backward can still yield home truths.

The title, of course, is borrowed from the Chicago Tribune's premature ejaculation on November 3, 1948. And the Thomas E. Dewey-Harry S. Truman campaign serves as the occasion for a story that runs from the nominations of June to the November vote.

The place is Owosso, Michigan, population 16,000—which readers may be pardoned for not remembering was the birthplace of the dimly remembered Dewey, and in 1948 still home to his mother. One hometowner reminisces that as a lad the candidate “used to charge his mother a quarter to mow the lawn.”

Mallon, who says he was lured on by the “historical tragicomedy” of Owosso's fate, concedes in an author's note that he has taken liberties with history. Naturally. Yet they are camouflaged with a lot of period-setting name-dropping: Raintree County; Born Yesterday; the Louis-Walcott fight; the arrival of the Polaroid camera; Carol Landis' suicide; General Pershing's death; H. V. Kaltenborn; Whittaker Chambers.

The novel is thoroughly persuasive about the era, particularly as experienced by the characters in their teens and 20s who are about to slip or burst into brave new America. Nor does Mallon neglect the changes that would soon play havoc with small-town life, the 1950s famously being the decade of automobiles, highways and ranch houses. (Readers who, like several of the characters and your reviewer, cast their first vote in 1948, should have their own special memories stirred.)

At the center of the tale is a pleasantly old-fashioned triangle. Anne Macmurray, described early as “the dishy girl from Abner's Bookstore,” has to choose between Jack Riley, a War veteran, United Auto Workers organizer and Truman supporter, and the town's golden-haired lad, the pushy Peter Cox, a Dewey man who is running for State Senator. Peter, from a rich, socially elevated if brittle family, has been around; he's a fast worker with the ladies. Jack has been around, too, but in shabbier precincts.

The enlightened and otherwise admirable Anne is taken with The Naked and the Dead and proves it by telling somebody, “Fug you!” But Jane Austen seems to have had more influence on her. She is liberated, within reason. She is making her own way and trying to write a novel entitled The Time Being. She views Owosso at a novelist's remove as “exactly the sort of town artists fled from,” but finds herself caught up in the community excitement over the native son, whom she privately ridicules.

Anne is sexually venturesome yet not promiscuous, self-controlled yet willing at the right moment to go all the way, as they used to say when going part way was more common than it has become. “She was stroking his hair, pulling on his ears, and not doing anything to stop his hands.” (That's about as hot as the sex scenes get.)

There is no shortage in Mallon's Owosso of boosters and eccentrics who are living out their own dramas. Seventeen-year-old Billy Grimes, a natural-born go-getter (with a little inspiration from Dale Carnegie), who is sure to make a fortune in go-get-it postwar America, has a crush on beautiful Margaret Feller, who falls for Billy's best friend, Tim Herrick, a visionary or maybe just an unhappy youth, who decides one night to disappear from the world. Margaret, like Anne, has romantic longings, but of a more adolescent sort: “If he kissed her again, she would break the sound barrier, fly involuntarily over that threshold they were always hinting at in Girl's Health, the one past which she wouldn't be able to control herself.”

Tim's mother, Jane, the strangest yet a strangely understandable character in a book rich in provincial characters, ignores Tim and the rest of the world in her grief for her older son Arnie, killed in the War. She seeks consolation in numerology. Tim finds affectionate attention from a high school science teacher, Peter Sherwood, a homosexual several decades too early, who also grieves privately for Arnie. Their small circle is completed when he tells Jane, “We're alone in this town, and this is a hard place to be alone.”

And then there is crotchety Horace Sinclair, a Spanish-American War cavalryman, whose long-kept secret involving a suicide a half century ago is threatened by a promoter who plans to dig up the town's waterfront and turn it into Dewey Walk in honor of the man everyone expects to be the first President from Owosso. This pitchman's descendants are no doubt now building theme parks.

With a sympathetic eye for hometown oddities and an easy narrative way, Mallon moves these folks more or less smoothly among one another as the Presidential campaign heats up. His Owossoians keep revealing surprising and generally likable qualities. Even cocky Peter Cox is wryly aware of his own superficiality. (Anne is perfect from start to end, intelligent, emotionally open and never more appealing than when she is confused by her own feelings.)

The author, a sometime English professor and now a magazine editor, has written three novels that, to my loss, escaped my attention. He has a light touch, knowing yet not judgmental, exactly right for a tale about young people looking hopefully ahead to a spacious tomorrow even as they try to locate themselves in the narrow confine of their day's Owosso, which may be heaven or just a trap: Jack dreaming about a home; Tim dreaming of escape, by plane or bottle; Peter plotting politics; Billy figuring out a million schemes for making a fortune; Anne awaiting marvels yet unknown.

Though Mallon is careful not to come down too heavily on the matter, for all its easy charm his book has an undercurrent of early death and irretrievable loss. Owosso, after all, was once the coffin capital of the region, and powerful memories are buried in products of the Owosso casket company. Jane's love for her killed son has turned into an obsession with all the soldiers and sailors shipped home for burial or reburial in the old town cemetery.

Even Anne, uninfatuated with death, is touched by Owosso's elegiac appeal. In a passage that reflects the book's spirit, she finds herself in the cemetery:

She looked away for a second, back toward all the rows of headstones, newly carved or weatherbeaten: the men and women mated for life and now eternity; the babies of another time, dead the year they were born; long-lived maiden aunts buried with their parents, the dates so strangely aligned it took a visitor a few seconds to sort out the blood ties; the boys who'd gone down into the ground, for a second time, as Jane Herrick listened to “Taps”; the dozens of men who, right in this town, had built the caskets they lay in.

At moments the story slows and seems slight, but it is sustained by the telling, by the author's success in evoking Owosso and by his abiding sympathy for the town and its residents. “There's nothing wrong with this place,” Anne says, even though it is impossible to imagine her staying there for long. Anne excepted, there are no heroes here, and nobody who approaches villainy. You can't even work up much annoyance for Al Jackson, the salesman on the verge of becoming one of the developers who already in 1948 were conspiring in the destruction of communities everywhere.

It gives nothing away to report that despite its premonition of Owosso's decline, Dewey Defeats Truman ends with a batch of happy endings. One of them, of course, was the election.