SOURCE: Dunlap, John R. Review of Arts and Sciences: A Seventies Seduction, by Thomas Mallon. American Spectator 21, no. 5 (May 1988): 46.

In the following review, Dunlap offers a positive assessment of Arts and Sciences, calling the novel “tightly plotted, witty, good humored, full of good sentiment, [and utterly unsentimental.”]

Several years ago—in fact, the very year (1973) in which the plot of Thomas Mallon's first novel begins to unfold—Tom Wolfe wrote an essay on “The New Journalism,” wherein occurs a passing retrospective on Wolfe's five years in graduate school. Wolfe, doubtful of his ability to convey “the remotest idea” of the horrifying experience and groping through half a long paragraph for an appropriate metaphor, finally likens graduate school to “being locked inside a Seaboard Railroad roomette, sixteen miles from Gainesville, Florida, heading north on the Miami-to-New York run, with no water and the radiator turning red in an amok...