From Publishers Weekly
A new, gleeful exuberance infuses Mallon's latest novel, in which he turns his talent for fastidious historical detail (Dewey Defeats Truman, etc.) to the elaboration of a comedy of errors set in Manhattan during the 1920s. Bandbox is the name of a successful monthly magazine for men, the first and best of its kind until the recent defection of its star editor, Jimmy Gordon, to establish the rival Cutaway. The narrative centers on the cutthroat competition between the two magazines, a suspenseful battle in which two Bandbox editors secretly defect to the other magazine, providing inside information that allows Jimmy to scoop his old boss and win the ratings game. The narrative is a tad slow getting started, since Mallon must introduce each name on the masthead and succinctly describe their various duties. All his characters are colorful and fully dimensional, however, especially Bandbox's aging editor-in-chief, Jehoshaphat (variously Joe, or Phat) Harris, who seems closely modeled on the legendary Harold Ross of the New Yorker. In addition to the magazine staff, there's a Hollywood star chosen to be the subject of a cover story. She's a foul-mouthed nymphomaniac called Rosemary La Roche, who trails chaos in her wake. Mallon adroitly establishes the atmosphere of the Jazz Age, dropping such names as Al Jolson, Leopold and Loeb, President Coolidge, George M. Cohan and the crime boss Arnold Rothstein. The latter is a pivotal character, because when his goons kidnap a kid from Indiana who has come to New York because he idolizes Bandbox, the plot acquires the elements of a thriller. Prohibition, police corruption, a court trial, in-house intrigue, the narcotics trade, animal rights, two gentle romances and several surprise revelations propel the plot, not to mention one of the best features Mallon's ability to convey the deadline-obsessed mentality of a monthly magazine. Mallon has never before employed his wit and humor to such good effect; he writes with comic brio, indulging in clever repartee and nimble farce. To quote the closing sentence: "What do we do for an encore?"Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Somewhere in the middle of many of the sentences in Bandbox, Thomas Mallon thinks of something else he would also like us to know and tells us. As my wife pointed out, this could also be said of Proust, but the effect is very different. Whereas a Proustian sentence is a kind of unhurried labyrinthine journey, a Bandbox sentence spreads nervous energy, hopping up and down in place and clutching at your lapel.Which is only right, given the elements Mallon is concerned with here. The time is from December 1928 until May 1929, the place is Manhattan, and the story concerns the efforts of a top magazine editor to keep himself and his magazine on top, despite the underhanded incursions of a protégé gone bad, who has started up a rival tony men's mag. (Mallon has been literary editor of GQ.)The story is set in the Jazz Age, in other words, so it's only right for the narration to be jazzed up. As Ann Douglas has pointed out in her study of New York in the '20s, Terrible Honesty, a new era was at that moment coming into being: "Skyscraper New York was the birthplace of all those all-powerful colonizers of space, the media. . . . New York in the 1920s celebrated excitement, danger, record-making and record-breaking, catastrophe and farce."All the above are in Bandbox, plus kidnapping, bribery, plagiarism and koala-burgling. Even the skyscrapers are noted. Editor Joe Harris, our hero, "looked out the fourteenth-floor windows of his corner office" in the just-completed Graybar Building, "to the vertical world aborning all around him. The Bowery Savings Bank loomed in the southeast, and a few streets over . . . the absurd new towers of Tudor City, in whose tiny apartments his aging pals had taken to stashing their chorines and tootsies. Directly across Lexington Avenue . . . squares of earth were roped off for the great excavations now sprouting the Chrysler and Chanin buildings. It all made Harris dizzy."It made everyone dizzy. As Douglas noted, the people creating this new world were made very nervous by it, and as a result there was a whole lot of self-medication going on, despite Prohibition's best efforts to get everybody to sober up. Our story begins when editor Harris mistakenly sends a vodka bottle instead of a message canister through the pneumatic tube of the interoffice mail chute, clipping in the eye his sleeping vaudeville reviewer, a fellow named Cuddles Hoolihan, who is sleeping partly because vaudeville is dying.The message Harris had been trying to send instead of the booze was an early warning of the underhanded tricks Jimmy Gordon, Harris's one-time assistant and now competitor, intends to resort to in his efforts to make Cutaway, his upstart new entry onto the news stands, outdo Harris's Bandbox. This opening shot, in lieu of the misapplied vodka bottle, consists of a photo of the recently convicted Leopold and Loeb, in prison, smilingly arm in arm, as they together read a copy of Bandbox. It is Jimmy's intent to plaster this photo on Fifth Ave. buses and thus ruin Bandbox's reputation among its male readers.From the outset, then, we are steeped in the period. Liquor, vaudeville, celebrity murders, variant sex and the cutthroat rivalry of New York media: It's all here. As Mallon guides us through the rest of his twisty tale, we will meet everything from the talkies, just then coming on, to Bernarr Macfadden's publishing empire, where the staff has compulsory calisthenics every day and the flagship newspaper was the New York Evening Graphic, the National Enquirer of its time, most famous for the Composograph, or faked-up photo, "their fakery disclaimed in four-point type under the caption."While reading Bandbox, I kept being reminded of the New York novels of Dawn Powell. Her characters, too, were cocky, fast-talking, fast-thinking and, though they'd wince at the word, gallant. She, too, liked to toss an innocent lad from the Midwest into the scrum of hustling cityfolk, just to see what would happen. And she, too, gave the impression that in New York the party was going on all the time, and was both fun and dangerous.Real danger is implicit in Bandbox, behind the imitation danger of the comic plot. Actual people are mixed with Mallon's creations, and one of those is Arnold Rothstein, one of the founders of America's organized crime syndicates, the man said to have been behind the 1919 Black Sox scandal, and not much noted for his sense of humor. (On the other hand, the real Rothstein was murdered in a card game in 1928, while Bandbox's Rothstein is still alive in 1929, so he might not actually be as dangerous as the original.) Another source of unstated danger in the book is the period itself. Mallon glancingly refers to the irrational exuberance in the stock market of the time, but he never foreshadows a world beyond that known by his characters. It is left to us, their book in our hands, to glance down the stream of time and notice the rapids that await there. Late in the book, a character is sent to jail for four months. He'll be getting out in September 1929 -- not the world he left.Given the variety of Thomas Mallon's previous books, it seems to me very unlikely we'll be hearing this jazzy voice from him again anytime soon. Let us relish it while we have it. Bandbox is delicious. Reviewed by Donald E. WestlakeCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
At the beginning of the novel, Mallon defines "bandbox" as a light, cylindrical box for holding small articles of attire. Rather than a serious piece of furniture, it's quite flimsy. Most reviewers report that the novel of the same name is a light work of literature as well; it's neither highly original nor mind-opening, and it won't stand the test of time.Its lightweight feel, however, does not diminish its charms. Bandbox has charm in spades. Mallon creates a huge, unique, and entertaining cast of characters, with each member engaging in clever capers while spewing zippy dialogue. Critics across the board call Mallon's depiction of the cutthroat magazine business spell-binding, and praise his evocation of the booming '20s. He does occasionally provide such in-depth detail that "without an encyclopedia (or access to the Internet) the general reader will not acquire an increased knowledge of the period," according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but the plethora of encyclopedic facts doesn't take away from the fun. Ubiquitous screwball comedy is the novel's selling point, but underneath lies a subtle foreshadowing of troubled times to come. More than one reviewer movingly noted the startling similarities between the 1920s and the 1990s. Not so startling is its timeless tale of office intrigue and romance. "For those willing to take a gamble," writes the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, "this novel simply vibrates with talent and goodwill." Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Mallon is, to steal one of the many effervescently clever phrases tossed about by his irresistible Jazz Age characters in his delicious sixth novel, "absotively posilutely" a pleasure to read. A master of insightful and uniquely focused historical novels, Mallon crisply conjures the carpe diem lawlessness of 1920s New York in this scintillating tale about a down-and-dirty rivalry between two magazines. Bandbox, brainchild of seasoned editor Jehoshaphat Harris, is a pioneering and wildly successful GQ -esque publication (also a critic, Mallon has written for GQ ). But Harris' unscrupulous protege, Jimmy Gordon, has launched a hip competitor, Cutaway, forcing Harris into a vicious life-or-death battle. As the flinty veteran and the arrogant pretender square off, Mallon sets in motion all manner of intrigue, capers, publicity stunts, blackmail, romance, and heroic moments involving a gay and dissolute cover boy, a nebbishy rewrite man, inept spies and mobsters, a cute rube from Indiana, a terrifyingly lustful Hollywood diva, and a very proper copy editor made of tougher stuff than anyone realizes, one of several women of valor. Strongly plotted and laced with witty wordplay and covert social critique, this tale of ambition, betrayal, and love is pure joy. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
"Cuddles Houlihan got clipped by the vodka bottle as it exited the pneumatic tube. . . ." With that bottle we enter Bandbox, a hugely successful magazine of the 1920s, run by bombastic Jehoshaphat "Joe" Harris. Harris's most ambitious protégé ("the bastard son he never had") has just defected to run the competition, plunging Bandbox into a newsstand death struggle. The magazine's fight for survival will soon involve a sabotaged fiction contest, the vice squad, a subscriber's kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the reader races from skyscraper to speakeasy.

Thomas Mallon has given us a madcap romp of a book that brilliantly portrays Manhattan in the gaudiest American decade of them all.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Bandbox is a hugely successful magazine, a glamorous monthly cocktail of 1920s obsessions from the stock market to radio to gangland murder. Edited by the bombastic Jehoshaphat "Joe" Harris, the magazine has a masthead that includes, among many others, a grisly, alliterative crime writer; a shy but murderously determined copyboy; and a burned-out vaudeville correspondent who's lovesick for his loyal, dewy assistant." As the novel opens, the defection of Harris's most ambitious protege has plunged Bandbox into a death struggle with a new competitor on the newsstand. But there's more to come: a sabotaged fiction contest, the NYPD vice squad, a subscriber's kidnapping, and a film-actress cover subject who makes the heroines of Fosse's Chicago look like the girls next door. While Harris and his magazine careen from comic crisis to make-or-break calamity, the novel races from skyscraper to speakeasy, hops a luxury train to Hollywood, and crashes a buttoned-down dinner with Calvin Coolidge.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Bandbox is slight but enjoyable, with enough sweet froth to put a mustache on the most finicky sipper. Readers who know little or nothing of the tempestuous teapot struggles in the New York magazine world will be gratified by the period detail as well as the pace. — Sven Birkerts

The Washington Post

Given the variety of Thomas Mallon's previous books, it seems to me very unlikely we'll be hearing this jazzy voice from him again anytime soon. Let us relish it while we have it. Bandbox is delicious. — Donald E. Westlake

The New Yorker

Mallon’s fizzy new novel is set at a men’s magazine during the Jazz Age—and a raging newsstand war. The aging but irrepressible Jehoshaphat Harris has made Bandbox into a roaring success, but now his right-hand man has left to start a rival magazine and the future of Harris’s venture is in jeopardy. As photo shoots go awry, profile subjects go berserk, and writers go on benders—some things don’t change—the novel, like its main character, never lets the energy flag. Mallon, in his other books, has gravitated toward previous eras out of an affinity for something like reticence. “Bandbox,” then, is a real departure: antic, stylized, and up-tempo. The dialogue has a Kaufman-and-Hart crackle, and the story boasts more lotharios, floozies, mobsters, and wised-up dames than an M-G-M double feature.

Publishers Weekly

A new, gleeful exuberance infuses Mallon's latest novel, in which he turns his talent for fastidious historical detail (Dewey Defeats Truman, etc.) to the elaboration of a comedy of errors set in Manhattan during the 1920s. Bandbox is the name of a successful monthly magazine for men, the first and best of its kind until the recent defection of its star editor, Jimmy Gordon, to establish the rival Cutaway. The narrative centers on the cutthroat competition between the two magazines, a suspenseful battle in which two Bandbox editors secretly defect to the other magazine, providing inside information that allows Jimmy to scoop his old boss and win the ratings game. The narrative is a tad slow getting started, since Mallon must introduce each name on the masthead and succinctly describe their various duties. All his characters are colorful and fully dimensional, however, especially Bandbox's aging editor-in-chief, Jehoshaphat (variously Joe, or Phat) Harris, who seems closely modeled on the legendary Harold Ross of the New Yorker. In addition to the magazine staff, there's a Hollywood star chosen to be the subject of a cover story. She's a foul-mouthed nymphomaniac called Rosemary La Roche, who trails chaos in her wake. Mallon adroitly establishes the atmosphere of the Jazz Age, dropping such names as Al Jolson, Leopold and Loeb, President Coolidge, George M. Cohan and the crime boss Arnold Rothstein. The latter is a pivotal character, because when his goons kidnap a kid from Indiana who has come to New York because he idolizes Bandbox, the plot acquires the elements of a thriller. Prohibition, police corruption, a court trial, in-house intrigue, the narcotics trade, animal rights, two gentle romances and several surprise revelations propel the plot, not to mention one of the best features Mallon's ability to convey the deadline-obsessed mentality of a monthly magazine. Mallon has never before employed his wit and humor to such good effect; he writes with comic brio, indulging in clever repartee and nimble farce. To quote the closing sentence: "What do we do for an encore?" (Jan. 6) Forecast: Prominent coverage (reviewers will relish the period publishing world setting) and Mallon's unusually lighthearted approach should make this one of the author's best-selling titles. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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