The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994

In this compulsively browsable collection, novelist Mallon (Up with the Sun) presents diary entries covering the 11 years following his move to Manhattan at age 32. Things started hopefully: Mallon scored book-reviewing gigs and got tenure as an English professor at Vassar, but he also weathered grief and fear as the AIDS epidemic claimed his friends and then his lover, whose death overshadowed Mallon’s first months in the city. After a low period (“All day long I’ve swung between tears, panic, rage, revenge fantasies,” he fumes after the New York Times pans one of his books), he slowly gathered momentum: a job as an editor at GQ gave him entry into literary circles; he met his soulmate, artist Bill Bodenschatz; and his 1994 historical novel, Henry and Clara, became a hit thanks in part to a rave from John Updike. Mallon’s diaries paint an arresting panorama of Reagan-era New York City, full of droll character studies—William S. Burroughs “looked like a bewildered old street person.” Mallon himself comes across as complicated and often prickly, but his prose conveys deep emotion with clear-eyed, matter-of-fact detail. It amounts to an engrossing evocation of an artist and a city in transition. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (June)