SOURCE: Schmuhl, Robert. “Thomas Mallon Considers the Works of Some Literary Contemporaries and Predecessors.” Chicago Tribune Books (21 January 2001): 1, 4.

In the following review, Schmuhl discusses Mallon's approach to literary criticism in In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing.

In the second paragraph of In Fact, Thomas Mallon regurgitates a sentence of professorial, publish-or-perish prose representative of the so-called scholarship coming out of literature departments nowadays. Gagging phrases that refer to “the ontic vacancy of raw diversity,” “a plurality of multiplicative inverses” and “orderly and sequential monogenesis” might mean something to their perpetrator, but Mallon objects, later deciding to forfeit his tenured position at Vassar College to write for what he (and others before him) approvingly call “the common reader.”

This collection of literary essays, composed from 1978 to 2000 for a dozen publications, is a sustained declaration of independence from the insomnia-curing word-processing of contemporary academic criticism. With a savvy and...