Book Review

By Derryll White

Mullen, Thomas (2024).  The Rumor Game.

Thomas Mullen really got things stirred up with the Atlanta cycle of novels, looking at police and race relations in the South.  Now he has brought those amazing research and writing skills to Boston, and the Second World War.  With racism it is always interesting to look at roots. We forget where these feelings come from.

Mullen has the gift of making things more personal.  His characters often act and talk like your sister or best friend.  He makes a connection with the reader that makes WW II feel like it happened just yesterday.  He is also very clear that America is made up of many different communities – Irish, Jewish, Italian – all with very different motives and allegiances.

The author subtly exposes the lie that the U.S. is a “free” nation, that the freedom of the press is sacrosanct. Thomas Mullen has done a lot of very good research for this novel. The reader is encouraged to think about what really might have happened during the time America got drawn into the Second World War, and who benefitted financially.  In the end the author leaves the reader with a lot to think about, but makes it all very worthwhile.

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Excerpts from the novel:

RETOOLING – Matthew Lloyd was the owner of Northeast Munitions, which not long ago had been known as Northeast Machinery, manufacturer of boilers for homes and offices, engine parts for large boats.  Like countless factories across the country, it had jettisoned and revamped its old assembly lines, reinventing itself for the government’s insatiable new demands.  It still designed some boat parts that came in handy for the navy, but it mostly had moved on to artillery and firearms.

THE DURATION  – We would write letters to our loved ones and pray for the duration.

     We would watch a staggering amount of war movies for the duration, although honestly we were getting rather tired of them, and all that ultrapatriotic sloganeering  and whatnot, so we wouldn’t mind a good gangster movie, even one about immoral American bank robbers and liquor barons killing without regret. Regardless of the propaganda that might provide to the Nazis and Japs, so therefore Hollywood wouldn’t actually be making any such films for the duration, but it was nice to think about.

    We would move back in with our parents while our newly married husband was off at war (unless we were a particularly bold sort of gal) for the duration.  We would endure and toil and defer our dreams for the duration.

    But how long exactly would the duration last?  And who would we be when it ended?

RACISM – It was depressing to realize just how entrenched his family’s bigotry was.  He too had been raised thinking that Jews were different, that they had betrayed Jesus and couldn’t be trusted. It wasn’t until Harvard that he interacted with Jewish students – many of them from hardscrabble backgrounds – and came to realize that the stories his father had told him were bunk. The few times he brought this up with Pop, he’d been accused of forgetting who he was, letting the Yankee establishment put silly ideas in his head.  So. he mostly kept his contrarian opinion to himself.

He wasn’t sure whether such bigotries were getting worse because of tensions about the war and communism, or if he was just noticing it more because he felt he’d stepped beyond them.  Pop was right that college had put ideas in his head, but Devon didn’t feel that was a bad thing.

WAR – Maybe the relationship would have had a better chance had it not been born of war and terror, flight and escape. She’d heard old stories and legends where the opposite was true, dashing tales in which danger heightened the romance, made life magical.  That was not the case in the real world.  War meant not having the luxury to relax into love.  A poverty of the heart.  Fear making you so focused on survival that anything else was extraneous.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org

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