Goddard's narrator writes movingly of his emotionally fragile mother, his complicated relationship with faith and other factors that define his life. And I cannot turn away.' In these more poetic moments, the novel echoes the rhythm and sentiments of Pablo Neruda's love poems. At one point, the narrator writes that his girlfriend is 'not the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Readers experience this romance through the novel's three sections: the relationship's inception, when the unnamed woman buys one of the unnamed narrator's essays for her magazine and asks to meet him three years later, during their relationship and five years after their breakup, when the still-grieving narrator writes, 'I do not know where you are.'Įach section contains short chapters of a page or two of terse paragraphs, a structure that may remind some readers of the stories of Lydia Davis. This slender work presents three periods in the life of a young man so distraught that he writes: 'The year you arrived I had been shrinking myself.' The person he writes this to is the woman with whom he becomes romantically involved. Nell Beram, author and freelance writerĮven readers who don't know that the British writer Keiran Goddard is a poet will suspect as much from the lyricism of Hourglass, his debut novel. The wonder of Mallon's characterization is that, for all of Dick's weaselly ways, he remains sympathetic-except when he crosses Lucille Ball. As it happens, Matt was at a dinner party at Dick's Manhattan duplex the night before Dick and his live-in boyfriend were fatally shot in what seems to have been a robbery gone wrong.ĭick's unlikability is on hilariously preening display in Up with the Sun's odd-numbered chapters an omniscient narrator remarks that with Dick, 'ambition stuck out like a cowlick or a horn, fatal to an audience's complete belief in almost any character he was playing.' These chapters trace Dick's life as a well-born striver whose many attempts to set Hollywood afire, most promisingly with the doomed sitcom Hank (1965-66), ended in crushing disappointment refashioned into rage. They're narrated by Matt Liannetto, a native New Yorker who makes his living as a pianist for musicals he met Dick in 1951, when they were working on the same show. The novel's even-numbered chapters unspool like a mystery. Dick Kallman-an American actor turned antiques dealer who was murdered in 1980-may not have been a prominent historical figure, but in Up with the Sun, Mallon leans on the not-quite star's biography to tell a story every bit as revealing about American ambition as the author's previous efforts centered on political giants.

Novelist Thomas Mallon has mastered the art of fictionalizing the lives of historical figures: Richard Nixon in Watergate, Ronald Reagan in Finale and so on.

Finlay donovan jumps the gun