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Review by James William Brown
Living in the past demands much more effort than living in the present, thinks 72-year-old Horace Sinclair of Owosso, Michigan, setting for Dewey Defeats Truman. It also requires ". . . ever greater imaginative stamina to keep chasing it down the tracks. The present asked no more than that he get aboard and take a window seat."
Author Thomas Mallon definitely has this necessary "imaginative stamina" for the past, as demonstrated in his much praised Henry and Clara. Now, in Dewey Defeats Truman, it's the summer and autumn of 1948 in Tom Dewey's Michigan hometown where the populace, like the national pundits, is certain that their favorite son will triumph. So convinced are they of Dewey's place in presidential history and theirs by association, that they're caught up in a fever of plans to turn the town into a kind of tourist museum of Dewey's early years.
Keeping her head in all this is aspiring novelist Anne Macmurray. From the vantage point of her job in a local bookstore, Anne observes the town which at first seems to be almost a microcosm for the nation. She's also trying to choose between two young men: Peter Cox, the charming but slick young Republican candidate for state senate, and Jack Riley, the rougher-hewn union organizer and Democrat.
If Anne's dilemma reflects a little too obviously the larger one facing the nation's voters, author Mallon seems to suggest that the choices faced in 1948 were not just matters of the past. The struggle between post-Roosevelt supporters of New Deal-type programs and those who would cut them in order to lower taxes has not resolved itself in the decades which followed the forties. It remains part of a larger confusion about national direction or lack of it. And when Anne says of Truman, "Character ought to count for something . . . " we understand that her decade is also ours.
Both the town and its times, the election and its issues seem, in fact, even fresher and far livelier than the election we've just experienced. But Mallon wisely avoids taking sides politically. His focus is the town itself with its web of secrets and dreams, its yearning for a tiny slice of immortality. It rises before us, a world complete in all its details of clothing and slang, the smells and tastes of leisurely dinner parties, the despair over the coffins still arriving at the train depot with the remains of war dead to be re-buried in the local cemetery. It seems to be a place where we've all lived.
But the real strength of Dewey Defeats Truman is in its understanding that the past is not really another country. It lies all around us, inextricably mixed with and helping to shape these sometimes sad, often ill-advised or unintentionally hilarious adventures we call the present.
James William Brown is a freelance writer in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.