Many—one is tempted to say most–contemporary novels take a purely private emotional situation as their point of departure. It is part of Thomas Mallon’s approach to invert this formula by placing public life at the center of his novels. His latest, Dewey Defeats Truman, is set in Thomas E. Dewey’s hometown of Owosso, Michigan, and unfolds over the months preceding the 1948 presidential election, which Dewey, the Republican candidate, was widely expected to win. The certainty of Dewey’s impending victory over the incumbent, Harry Truman, shapes most of the action in this novel, including the love affair that stands at its center.

Dewey, of course, does not win (DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN was the November 3, 1948, headline of the then-conservative Chicago Tribune, a paper with ulterior reasons for jumping the gun). The love affair, which is actually a love triangle, is rather charmingly employed to measure the effect of national politics on private, even intimately sexual, life. The heroine is Connecticut-born Anne Macmurray, recently graduated from the University of Michigan, who wants to write “a novel, one that had nothing to do with herself.” To support herself she has taken a job at the only bookstore in Owosso, where when we first encounter her she is reading the most popular novel of the day, The Naked and the Dead. What is a beautiful, literate girl from the East Coast doing in Owosso, Michigan? The explanation recalls Philip Larkin’s poem “The Importance of Elsewhere”: