SOURCE: Goodman, Walter. “Looking Backward.” New Leader 79, no. 9 (16 December 1996): 26-8.

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...