Michael Magras

FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

So far from home

Review by Michael Magras

In The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s assured debut novel, Deming Guo, an 11-year-old Chinese boy living in New York City, experiences a child’s worst nightmare: His single mother, Polly, an undocumented immigrant, goes to work one day and doesn’t come home. That event is the catalyst for a timely story of immigrant families in America.

As a teenager, Polly, born in a poor Chinese province, gets pregnant after a fling with a classmate. She goes into debt to a loan shark for the money to travel to America, where she has the baby. She soon discovers she can’t care for the boy while working to pay off the debt, so she sends 1-year-old Deming back to China, where her elderly father cares for him. But when Deming is 6, he returns to the U.S. after his grandfather dies.

By that time, Polly is living with her boyfriend; his sister, Vivian; and Vivian’s son, Michael. After Polly disappears, Deming spends a brief stint in foster care. He is adopted by a childless white couple, 40ish professors who live upstate and change Deming’s name to Daniel. By age 21, Daniel is an indifferent student, an aspiring rock musician and an inveterate gambler. His adoptive parents encourage him to enroll in classes at their college, but the city and a music career hold greater appeal. All of these plans are upended when Michael, who hasn’t seen Daniel since the adoption, tracks him down with information about Polly.

Some of the story’s contrasts, especially between Deming’s birth and adoptive families, are too stark, but The Leavers (winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver) is a thoughtful work about undocumented immigrants and the threats they endure. Midway through the novel, Polly recalls a subway ride when Deming was little. The train emerges from underground, “tearing straight into the sunlight, and I couldn’t wait to see your face.” That’s a beautiful expression of love that every family should appreciate.

In The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s assured debut novel, Deming Guo, an 11-year-old Chinese boy living in New York City, experiences a child’s worst nightmare: His single mother, Polly, an undocumented immigrant, goes to work one day and doesn’t come home. That event is the catalyst for a timely story of immigrant families in America.

FictionDebut Fiction

Haunted by a brief, intoxicating friendship

Review by Michael Magras

From its brilliant opening sentence, “Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are,” Julie Buntin’s debut novel creates a hauntingly original atmosphere for a familiar story. In Marlena, a woman in her 30s recalls events from two decades earlier, when a brief friendship had a profound impact on her life.

When Cat was 15, she and her “full-blown poor” family, which included her divorced mother and older brother, moved from their home in a Detroit suburb to a “grubby half-acre” in the woods of Silver Lake, Michigan. As she helps unload the U-Haul, Cat meets Marlena Joyner, two years her senior, who lives nearby in “a renovated barn coated in layers of lilac paint that were sticky to the touch.”

Cat and Marlena become best friends. Their friendship lasts only a year, until Marlena “suffocated in less than six inches of ice-splintered river.” But it’s a life-changing year for Cat, one in which Marlena introduces her to a world very different from her accustomed environment. She encourages Cat, an excellent student in her previous school, to cut classes, drink heavily and take recreational drugs. And Marlena’s father is hardly a stabilizing influence; he cooks meth in a railcar behind their house.

Today, Cat has a prominent job in New York, but the effects of her Silver Lake years remain. She still struggles with alcoholism, and when Marlena’s younger brother, Sal, who was 8 when his sister died, calls Cat to say that he’s in town, events from a past she never quite forgot come rushing back.

Despite an error in chronology—YouTube, which figures into the narrative, wasn’t around 20 years ago—Marlena is still an unforgettable portrait of teenage confusion and experimentation, a time when one discovers “that time doesn’t belong to you. All you have is what you remember.”

 

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From its brilliant opening sentence, “Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are,” Julie Buntin’s debut novel creates a hauntingly original atmosphere for a familiar story. In Marlena, a woman in her 30s recalls events from two decades earlier, when a brief friendship had a profound impact on her life.

FictionThriller

Dark undercurrents

Review by Michael Magras

No one who has read Dan Chaon’s fiction will be surprised to learn that Ill Will, his new novel, is relentlessly bleak. It’s a murder mystery and a literary thriller, a multilayered nonlinear narrative and a psychological portrait of the dark side of human nature. You’ll lose track of the number of deaths, but you’ll remember the daring storytelling and the skillful treatment of characters who live with repressed memories.

If you’re Dustin Tillman, a 41-year-old Cleveland psychologist, widower and father of two teenage sons, then you’ve got horrific memories to repress. When Dustin was 13, his parents and an aunt and uncle were murdered on the eve of a camping trip. A Pulitzer-nominated photograph of Dustin running from the scene with his twin cousins, Kate and Wave, became famous.

The murder was blamed on Dustin’s adopted older brother, Rusty, in part because of Dustin’s testimony; he claimed that Rusty had engaged in satanic rituals involving baby rabbits, a doll and a candlelit pentagram. Now, 27 years after the murder, DNA evidence exonerates Rusty, who has always proclaimed his innocence and contended that Dustin’s testimony was based on faulty recollection.

Rusty’s re-emergence is only one of the factors that complicate Dustin’s life. In addition to his wife’s death and his younger son’s growing heroin addiction, Dustin has a patient, a Cleveland police officer put on leave for a “psychological difficulty,” who recruits Dustin to help solve a series of murders of college-age men who have drowned on dates that follow a pattern. And the next date to fit the pattern is coming up.

Throughout Ill Will, Chaon plays with the novel form: second-person narration, emails, shifting perspectives, emojis and, most radically, parallel columns of prose that show concurrent thoughts and episodes in characters’ lives. The result could have been style for style’s sake, but, in Chaon’s capable hands, the novel is a brilliant depiction of mental illness. Not a pretty picture, but masterfully painted.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

No one who has read Dan Chaon’s fiction will be surprised to learn that Ill Will, his new novel, is relentlessly bleak. It’s a murder mystery and a literary thriller, a multilayered nonlinear narrative and a psychological portrait of the dark side of human nature. You’ll lose track of the number of deaths, but you’ll remember the daring storytelling and the skillful treatment of characters who live with repressed memories.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Questions of fidelity

Review by Michael Magras

There’s more than one way to feel like a stranger in a foreign land. The pleasant way is to travel to a vacation spot, but a more unnerving sense of dislocation comes when one is a party to a faltering marriage. Katie Kitamura explores this theme in her new novel, A Separation, a quietly devastating story of a childless, London-based couple on the verge of divorce.

The unnamed narrator works as a translator, though we never learn her country of origin. When the novel begins, Christopher, the narrator’s husband, has been in Greece for a month to conduct research for a book, a general-interest “study of mourning rituals around the world”—an odd topic, the narrator thinks, for a “careless flirt” in his early 40s who has never suffered loss. When Christopher’s mother can’t reach him in Greece, she worries that something is wrong. Unaware of the couple’s six-month separation, she buys the narrator a ticket to go and investigate. What follows is a psychologically rich story involving a female hotel clerk, a “widely admired weeper” known for her musical lamentations and a murder.

Kitamura finds a clever parallel between the art of translation and marriage: the struggle to be faithful, which, as the narrator states, is “an impossible task because there are multiple and contradictory ways” of achieving fidelity. As this coolly elegant work makes clear, the definition of fealty may vary depending on whom you ask.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There’s more than one way to feel like a stranger in a foreign land. The pleasant way is to travel to a vacation spot, but a more unnerving sense of dislocation comes when one is a party to a faltering marriage. Katie Kitamura explores this theme in her new novel, A Separation, a quietly devastating story of a childless, London-based couple on the verge of divorce.

FictionWorld Fiction

After an uprising

Review by Michael Magras

In December 1979, shortly after the assassination of President Park Chung-hee, army general Chun Doo-hwan assumed the role of South Korean leader. His expansion of martial law and crackdown on political activities led to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, an anti-authoritarian movement that began with student demonstrations and ended with the killing by government troops of hundreds of citizens, many of them in their teens.

Han Kang, author of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize-winning novel The Vegetarian, revisits the uprising’s toll on her native South Korea in Human Acts, a harrowing and stylistically daring series of linked stories.

Kang shifts perspectives and narrative styles throughout the book. The central figure who connects the stories is Dong-ho, a 15-year-old in his third year of middle school who, during the uprising, searches for Jeong-dae, his best friend, whom he believes has been killed. But, in the process of looking for his friend, Dong-ho becomes one of the casualties.

The other stories, set from 1980 through 2013, are told from the point of view of characters who were part of the uprising, including an editor contending with state censorship, an ex-prisoner who was the militia chief in the students’ plan to hold the university’s Provincial Office, a former factory employee traumatized for 20 years by the torture she suffered, Dong-ho’s mother and, in an audacious authorial move, Jeong-dae’s corpse. The epilogue focuses on Kang herself, who recalls hearing adults speak of a murdered 15-year-old when she was 9 and now wants to learn all she can about his fate. 

Although Human Acts depicts violence in graphic detail, anyone who reads this work will be moved not only by Kang’s poetic telling of horrific events but also by her nuanced treatment of the material. As the ex-prisoner asks, “Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species?” This novel is a thoughtful and humane answer to difficult questions and a moving tribute to victims of the atrocity.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook

In December 1979, shortly after the assassination of President Park Chung-hee, army general Chun Doo-hwan assumed the role of South Korean leader. His expansion of martial law and crackdown on political activities led to the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, an anti-authoritarian movement that began with student demonstrations and ended with the killing by government troops of hundreds of citizens, many of them in their teens.
FictionWorld Fiction

A Spanish master takes influence from Shakespeare

Review by Michael Magras

The title of Thus Bad Begins, Javier Marías’ challenging new novel, comes from Act III of Hamlet: “Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind,” or, in other words, the current situation may be dire, but worse is to come. The Prince of Denmark’s preceding line is, “I must be cruel only to be kind.” As in the play, there’s cruelty in this book, and, like Shakespeare, Marías is canny enough to ask, is malice ever justified?

The narrator, Juan de Vere, recounts the brief time in 1980—five years after the end of the Franco dictatorship—when he was the 23-year-old live-in amanuensis to film director Eduardo Muriel. After Juan had been in the older man’s employment for a while, Muriel made an unusual request.

He asked Juan to spy on Jorge Van Vechten, a 60-year-old pediatrician who, despite having served on the Nationalist side during the Spanish Civil War, earned a reputation as a caring doctor who tended to everyone, even those subject to reprisals after the war.

Muriel wanted Juan to invite Van Vechten out at night and introduce him to women. He didn’t explain his reasons, except to tell Juan that Van Vechten “behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman, or possibly more than one.” Juan soon suspected that this hint related to another of the novel’s many mysteries, Muriel’s brutal treatment of his 40-year-old wife, Beatriz. 

Thus Bad Begins is less focused than The Infatuations, Marías’ 2013 masterpiece, but it’s a satisfyingly enigmatic work that dares to ask: What’s the point of setting a record straight if the truth “gives the lie to everything that went before”? This being a Marías novel, there are no easy answers, and that’s as it should be. As Juan says, “The past has a future we never expect.”

 

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The title of Thus Bad Begins, Javier Marías’ challenging new novel, comes from Act III of Hamlet: “Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind,” or, in other words, the current situation may be dire, but worse is to come. The Prince of Denmark’s preceding line is, “I must be cruel only to be kind.” As in the play, there’s cruelty in this book, and, like Shakespeare, Marías is canny enough to ask, is malice ever justified?
FictionDebut Fiction

A family in flux between Cuba and the U.S.

Review by Michael Magras

The Mortifications, Derek Palacio’s beautifully written debut novel, begins in 1980, during the Mariel boatlift that took refugees from Cuba to the United States. Soledad Encarnación packs her 12-year-old son, Ulises, and his twin sister, Isabel, onto an overcrowded lobster boat that carries them away from their village of Buey Arriba. Her husband, Uxbal, chooses to stay behind, but not without first trying to prevent his family’s departure by holding Isabel ransom.

In Connecticut, Soledad becomes a court stenographer and attracts the attention of lawyers who find her exotic. She falls in love with Henri Willems, a Dutch horticulturalist who grows Cuba’s Habano tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley.

At 17, Ulises, a budding Latin scholar, gets a job working in Henri’s fields. The more devout Isabel volunteers with the terminally ill at Jude the Apostle. Soon, she takes a vow of chastity and silence and leaves for Guatemala to establish a school funded by the church. And all of this is before Soledad’s diagnosis of breast cancer and a letter from Uxbal, who demands his family’s return to Cuba.

The Mortifications is a devastating portrait of the realities we construct for ourselves, the parts of our history we choose to embrace and those we yearn to escape. In deceptively simple prose, Palacio writes movingly of dreams and family legacies and reminds us that, no matter how far away you travel, some aspects of one’s ancestry are forever a part of you.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Mortifications, Derek Palacio’s beautifully written debut novel, begins in 1980, during the Mariel boatlift that took refugees from Cuba to the United States. Soledad Encarnación packs her 12-year-old son, Ulises, and his twin sister, Isabel, onto an overcrowded lobster boat that carries them away from their village of Buey Arriba. Her husband, Uxbal, chooses to stay behind, but not without first trying to prevent his family’s departure by holding Isabel ransom.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A long drive

Review by Michael Magras

When Queens resident Leah Kaplan gets a phone call from someone she worked with in San Francisco a decade earlier, she can’t possibly foresee the strange events that are about to happen. The unexpected journey that takes her back to California and away from Hans, her husband of five years, is the driving force behind The Red Car, Marcy Dermansky’s odd and entertaining new novel.

Leah had yet to earn her MFA when she worked at the University of California’s Facilities Management Department, writing job descriptions for custodians and engineers. Shortly before Leah left, her boss, Judy, took her to lunch in her “dream come true”: a “blindingly red” sports car she had wanted all her life.

Flash forward 10 years, when a former coworker calls to say that Judy died in an accident involving the red car and has left the car to Leah. The novel then takes a surreal turn. Leah hears Judy’s voice in her head. She travels West for the funeral, where everyone from former colleagues to total strangers wants to sleep with her. Judy’s car may be possessed: First, it fixes itself; then people who drive it have trouble keeping to a safe speed. Then Leah begins to suspect that Judy’s death may not have been an accident. 

Well before Dermansky mentions him, it’s clear we’re in the realm of Haruki Murakami: the staccato rhythm and short sentences; the presence of cats, if only in cartoon form on T-shirts; dialogue that’s not quite real speech. There’s even a Japanese motel clerk who, like many Murakami characters, is obsessed with American culture. If The Red Car doesn’t quite equal the bizarre beauty of the master’s finest work, it’s still a fun and addictive read. “Follow the signs,” deceased Judy advises Leah. Readers who do the same will enter a dreamlike world that is as familiar as it is skewed.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When Queens resident Leah Kaplan gets a phone call from someone she worked with in San Francisco a decade earlier, she can’t possibly foresee the strange events that are about to happen. The unexpected journey that takes her back to California and away from Hans, her husband of five years, is the driving force behind The Red Car, Marcy Dermansky’s odd and entertaining new novel.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The memories of war

Review by Michael Magras

It’s no secret that war tears families apart, including those comprised of militaristic parents and their pacifist offspring. Robert Olen Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, has written eloquent works about Vietnam and its effect on families. He returns to these themes in Perfume River, a heartbreaking story of fathers and sons and their expectations and disappointments.

Robert Quinlan, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran and professor of American history, lives in Florida with his wife, Darla, an art theorist. They’re enjoying tofu curry at a local co-op when a disheveled man with few teeth enters. Robert, thinking the man is a fellow Vietnam vet, buys him a meal. This encounter takes Robert back to his Vietnam service, where he was “one of the eight out of ten who goes to war and never kills.” 

Robert’s younger brother, Jimmy, moved to Canada rather than serve in the war, a decision that angered their World War II-veteran father. Jimmy now makes high-end leather goods, has an open marriage with Linda, his wife of 24 years, and hasn’t seen his parents and brother for 46 years.

But with their 89-year-old father on the verge of death after a fall, Jimmy has to decide whether to return to the States and risk unleashing decades of “unexpressed blame and justification, anger and regret.”

The disheveled man’s story, which Butler revisits throughout the book, feels extraneous, but Perfume River is a powerful work that asks profound questions about betrayal and loyalty. There are marvelous descriptions throughout: When Robert dashes out of a banyan tree, “a needle-thin compression of air zips past his head.” As this provocative novel makes clear, each of us does what he or she must, but acts of conviction are rarely free of consequences.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s no secret that war tears families apart, including those comprised of militaristic parents and their pacifist offspring. Robert Olen Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, has written eloquent works about Vietnam and its effect on families. He returns to these themes in Perfume River, a heartbreaking story of fathers and sons and their expectations and disappointments.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The economics of reviving a moribund marriage

Review by Michael Magras

When Nick Maguire moves his wife, Phoebe, and their 2-year-old son, Jackson, from Boston to Southern California, he hopes to put their rocky past behind them. But as quickly becomes apparent in Carousel Court, Joe McGinniss Jr.’s intense new novel, some bruises need more than time and distance to heal.

Nick, who makes his living producing corporate films, accepts a job as a production manager with a boutique firm in Encino. Phoebe, a former analyst at a financial-services firm in Boston, had an affair with the lead partner, known only as JW. Now, she sells (and takes) anxiety medicine for a pharmaceutical firm. Well aware of her attractiveness, she employs a unique method of enticing male doctors to buy her products.

One of the biggest motivators for the move occurred when Phoebe, exhausted and high on Klonopin, slammed her car into an idling truck and nearly killed Jackson. Nick’s plan had been to move West, buy an investment property to upgrade, and give Phoebe time to regain her stability.

But when Nick’s job offer falls through, he becomes a repo man who pretends to own some of the repossessed homes and rents them to unsuspecting tenants. He and Phoebe feel stuck in their own neighborhood, Carousel Court, with neighbors so fearful of one another that some of them sleep in tents and carry guns. And all of this is before JW contacts Phoebe with promises of future employment and the prospect of further infidelity.

Despite repetitive elements, Carousel Court is a searing indictment of excess ambition and a dark portrait of the bitterness that forms when life and careers don’t work out as planned. As McGinniss makes clear, no amount of fancy buttercream carpeting or expensive organic cherimoya will mask the pain of a strained marriage. But as one character says, “Maybe there is something approaching salvation to be found in all these dead houses.” The same is true of seemingly moribund marriages: They may be on the verge of collapse, but maybe some of them still have value.

When Nick Maguire moves his wife, Phoebe, and their 2-year-old son, Jackson, from Boston to Southern California, he hopes to put their rocky past behind them. But as quickly becomes apparent in Carousel Court, Joe McGinniss Jr.’s intense new novel, some bruises need more than time and distance to heal.

FictionDebut Fiction

A witty look at life in the service industry

Review by Michael Magras

Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler’s debut novel, is the literary equivalent of spiked chocolate mousse: the lightest of confections, but with a powerful kick. Danler, a former waitress, has fashioned a breezy piece of fiction that dramatizes the behind-the-scenes activities of a posh Manhattan restaurant in exact and unsparing detail. This episodic novel’s depiction of staff members who bandy profanities and snort the harshest drugs is so precise and vividly rendered that, the next time you patronize a fancy eatery, you may wonder what those smiling greeters are up to behind the swinging door.

In June 2006, a 22-year-old English major named Tess arrives in New York from her Midwestern hometown and gets a job as a back waiter at Union Square’s most popular restaurant. Tess is such a novice about food that, when she’s asked during her interview to name “the five noble grapes of Bordeaux,” she “pictured cartoon grapes wearing crowns on their heads, welcoming me to their châteaux.”

The owner hires Tess, however, because he sees her as a “fifty-one percenter,” a person who has the empathy and work ethic lacking in many restaurant employees. Soon, Tess is part of a crew that includes a chef who demands that no one speak to him while he cooks, a food runner who writes screenplays and the bartender with whom Tess is smitten.

Occasionally, Danler tries too hard to be literary, but for the most part, Sweetbitter is a feast of coarse dialogue and industry insight. “You will stumble on secrets,” Tess says early in the novel. So will readers of this entertaining debut.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler’s debut novel, is the literary equivalent of spiked chocolate mousse: the lightest of confections, but with a powerful kick. Danler, a former waitress, has fashioned a breezy piece of fiction that dramatizes the behind-the-scenes activities of a posh Manhattan restaurant in exact and unsparing detail. This episodic novel’s depiction of staff members who bandy profanities and snort the harshest drugs is so precise and vividly rendered that, the next time you patronize a fancy eatery, you may wonder what those smiling greeters are up to behind the swinging door.
FictionHistorical Fantasy

Where there’s smoke . . .

Review by Michael Magras

Perhaps you think it’s easy to spot beneficiaries of wealth and privilege in today’s society, but it is a lot easier in the late-Victorian England conjured by Dan Vyleta in Smoke, an inventive quasi-dystopian fantasy. The aristocracy are distinguished from the lower classes by one significant and immediately noticeable trait: The lower classes emit thick black smoke—or, as it appears here, Smoke.

This is an England in which babies turn black with Smoke and the resulting Soot minutes after they’re born; it’s the “dark plume of shame.” Think a bad thought or tell a falsehood, and tendrils of Smoke will alert the world to your misdeed.

The novel begins at a boarding school in which 200 upper-class boys are receiving a “moral education” to cure them of the evil they are born with. Two of them become best friends: wealthy Charlie Cooper and Thomas Argyle, whom one of the school’s young prefects, Julius Spencer, suspects of harboring a reprehensible secret.

At Christmas, the headmaster asks Charlie to accompany Thomas to the home of Baron Naylor, Thomas’ uncle. Keep an eye on Thomas, the headmaster tells Charlie, but he doesn’t say why. What follows is a shocking visit in which both boys become enamored of the baron’s daughter, Livia; discover experiments conducted with the Soot of prisoners; learn the mysterious properties of a tin of sweets; and uncover the real intentions of not only Julius but also the school’s masters.

From the houses of Parliament to London streets dense with costermongers and their handcarts, Smoke is an action-packed adventure that raises provocative questions about religion versus reason. As one character says in the second half of the book, Smoke  isn’t necessarily evil. One person’s wickedness is another person’s humanity. That’s the kind of subtle observation that makes a smart thriller easy to spot.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Perhaps you think it’s easy to spot beneficiaries of wealth and privilege in today’s society, but it is a lot easier in the late-Victorian England conjured by Dan Vyleta in Smoke, an inventive quasi-dystopian fantasy. The aristocracy are distinguished from the lower classes by one significant and immediately noticeable trait: The lower classes emit thick black smoke—or, as it appears here, Smoke.
FictionDebut Fiction

A delightfully ambitious debut

Review by Michael Magras

No one can accuse Martin Seay of lacking ambition. His first novel, The Mirror Thief, is a 600-page thrill ride across three centuries and two continents. But this is hardly a punishment for readers. It’s a workout, but of the intellectual kind: part crime thriller and part meditation on poetry, with unexpected plot twists and references to famous figures as diverse as the French dramatist Antonin Artaud and Jay Leno.

The action moves back and forth among three different parts of the world and three distinct eras. In 2003, on the eve of the second Gulf War, Curtis Stone, a 40-year-old African-American ex-Marine, arrives in Las Vegas from his Philadelphia home. A club owner named Damon has hired Curtis to search for gambler Stanley Glass, ostensibly to collect on a marker. Curtis has trouble locating the elusive Stanley, but he finds one of Stanley’s treasured possessions: a slender volume of poems, “The Mirror Thief,” written in 1958 by a proto-beatnik named Adrian Welles.

Cut to 1958, when Stanley, a 16-year-old card sharp fresh off the train from Staten Island, shows up in Malibu, California, in hope of meeting Welles. Stanley, who adores Welles’ poems, wants to talk about “The Mirror Thief” and its mysterious subject: a 16th-century alchemist named Crivano. The novel’s wildly ambitious third segment takes us to Venice in 1592, where a sultan has sent the murderous Crivano to “locate craftsmen adept at fashioning the flawless mirrors for which every civilized land celebrates the isle of Murano, and return with those craftsmen to the Ottoman court.”

The Mirror Thief is overstuffed with incident and period detail, but it’s still an impressive feat of imagination. Much of this book, Seay seems to be saying, is like one’s reflection in a mirror: What you see in front of you isn’t the whole story.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

No one can accuse Martin Seay of lacking ambition. His first novel, The Mirror Thief, is a 600-page thrill ride across three centuries and two continents. But this is hardly a punishment for readers. It’s a workout, but of the intellectual kind: part crime thriller and part meditation on poetry, with unexpected plot twists and references to famous figures as diverse as the French dramatist Antonin Artaud and Jay Leno.

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