Thomas Mallon did not, in fact, set out to become a historical novelist, much less a writer of against-the-grain cultural essays and literary criticism, but he had not counted on the damage that heavy theory would inflict on such vital organs as the head, heart, and ears of academia. As a worker in the vineyard of modern British literature, Mallon, when an assistant professor at Vassar, found himself faced with the daunting task of reviewing a book on Joseph Conrad packed to the gills with jaw-breaking sentences about “ontic vacancy” and “multiplicative inverses.” What to do? He could, of course, have given back sentences as good as he got, making it clear that he was one bright, up-and-coming cookie. Instead, Mallon served up the unvarnished truth about this book and dozens of others then pouring out of what were once our best university presses: “no one should write like this, ever.” But in arguing that critical prose was “rapidly moving beyond the Latinate and towards the Martian,” Mallon now admits that he was, in fact, telling himself to look for another job.

Fortunately, the heady days of high theory largely passed; unfortunately, they were replaced by the litany of race, class, and gender—so much so that, as Mallon rightly points out, they often “seemed to be one angry word, raceclassgender.” Thus it was that in the fall of 1987, Mallon found himself on his department’s hiring committee, plowing his way through dissertation chapters less interested in books than with one version or another of identity politics. Enough was enough, and the next year Mallon called it quits, giving up the comforts of tenure for life as a full-time writer. Since then he has eleven books to his credit, nearly equally divided between fiction and nonfiction.

In Fact is at once a generous collection of pieces he wrote for such magazines as The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, and Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and an ongoing exercise in autobiography. I say the latter because when Mallon writes about contemporaries such as Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, and Joan Didion or reassesses the likes of John O’Hara, Sinclair Lewis, and Truman Capote, he reveals not only a good deal about the writers under discussion but also, perhaps, even more about what piques his curiosity and engages his imagination. In reviewing a single book, he often uses the occasion to survey a writer’s career and to judge its cultural importance. Mallon also peppers his reviews with delicious one-liners. Writing about Nicholson Baker’s “defiantly molecular” prose, Mallon says “Baker doesn’t just count the angels on the head of a pin; he does long division with the feathers on their wing tips.” The rub—if it be a rub—is that this penchant for the mighty cute can become predictable when read in a collection rather than in individual units.

The same thing is roughly true for those essays out to show off Mallon’s considerable skills as a detective. We learn, for example, how he can construct a portrait of his late father by rifling through a shoe box of his canceled checks or how the items found in President Lincoln’s pockets on the night he was assassinated can lead to speculations about mythology. What delights us in each case is the sheer skillfulness of Mallon’s writing and the apparent ease with which he pulls it off. Still, Mallon would insist that the pulling together, and then the shaping, of facts is what finally matters. Many in the academy argue otherwise, not only suspicious about “facts” but also convinced that a word like “truth” must always be surrounded by sneer quotes and made to answer the following questions: Whose truths? And whose interests does it serve? To his credit, Mallon will have none of this. That is, in fact, why he left academia in the first place, and why he continues to believe in the value of grounded, verifiable facts. All these many years since writing his doctoral dissertation Mallon now admits that the outer world so rigorously detailed in the fiction of Trollope and Thackeray always meant more to him than the interior excavations of Joyce and Woolf.

A certain amount of repetition comes naturally to the territory of a collection like In Fact. We learn more than once, for example, that Ira Magaziner, the person largely responsible for the design of the failed Clinton health plan was also the man who had earlier designed Brown University’s infamous New Curriculum, and references to A Book of One’s Own, Mallon’s intriguing study of diarists, keep surfacing every fifth or sixth essay. No matter, say I, for what In Fact comes to is a celebration of where attending to specifics rather than to abstractions can take you. Small wonder that Mallon often seems to be a young curmudgeon, exactly the sort of person who will give most tell-all memoirs the drubbing they deserve or who will point out, in a devastating aside, that he “cannot conceive of a phrase in which the adjective condescends to the noun more than ‘magical realism.’” We need more writers this smart, this savvy, and most of all, this independent of mind.