The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay
My rating: 4/5 cats
…we sometimes find that our most momentous decisions are unseen by us as we make them. We perceive only a confusion of paltry choices, like the tesserae of a mosaic. Only with distance do prevailing images become clear.
in which the novel teasingly moons you with its own mission statement.
this is a great big enjoyable monster of a book.
before we start, i need to say that the ONLY reason i gave it four stars cats instead of five is because this is a book divided into three alternating narratives and while i loved curtis’ and stanley’s portions of the book, i struggled a bit with the crivano segments. maybe it was the time period or the less-theoretical descriptions of alchemical/philosophical/optical stuff, but i found myself too often during his segments doing that thing where your eyes are moving over the words but your brain isn’t absorbing the story and you have to go back a bunch of times to try and make it stick. the other two sections were an absolute delight to read, but i feel like i didn’t get as much out of the crivano parts as i should have. and since the three stories are connected and balanced upon one another, i’m sure there were subtleties i missed because of this, and that is certainly regrettable, but life is full of horrible failures and most of them are mine.
i also want to take a second to review the blurbs, because i think it was a great idea to cover the whole ARC with indie booksellers’ responses to this book, because booksellers will SELL YOUR BOOK.
especially the great anmiryam budner, who has this to say:
A genre-spanning tour de force that propels you on a quest through three cities and three moments in history, The Mirror Thief envelops you in its mysteries and conundrums, and then dazzles with its love stories, heists, and unexpected characters. Seay’s debut succeeds not only as entertainment, but also as an intricate and lovely meditation on the shared nature of human creativity and experience across time. Brilliant.
the other bookseller blurbs cite so many big-name comparisons that greg was scoffing at them a bit, which i get because i am also suspicious when SO MANY names are being thrown around; it usually sets up both very high and very contradictory expectations. however, having read the book, i can vouch that they are pretty solid touchpoints, and much better comps than most of the ones that come from publishers. i mean, not one of them mentioned Gone Girl. *
their collective list includes:
eco, david mitchell, nabokov, pynchon, stephenson, hemingway, palahniuk, delillo, The Da Vinci Code, rebel without a cause, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values…
for once, despite my inherent readers’ advisory sniffiness, i’m not affronted by that parade of comparisons. it’s not like most of those authors are so wildly dissimilar, after all – you can see the overlap and the point at which mitchell, delillo, pynchon, eco, and stephenson meet, stylistically and thematically, nabokov’s there out of respect, palahniuk shared a social commentary cab with delillo, The Da Vinci Code is eco’s +1 and is a distant cousin to this one; you can see the similarities in their bone structure if you squint, and as for the other two – well, here’s the whole blurb that mentions them, which is a perfect blurb qua blurb but is also perfect because it expresses exactly what you’d want from the source:
…A delicious stew of Los Angeles-type noir, Da Vinci Code mystery, Rebel Without a Cause toughness, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance mechanical spirituality.
-Steve Salardino, Skylight Books, Los Angeles, CA.
as for hemingway… i’m not actually sure why hemingway is here. i think he just heard there would be booze.
because, and now i will actually talk about the book – there isn’t anything concise or minimalist about this book – it’s big and chewy and meaty and it’s this throwback doorstopper of a book that feels contemporaneous to, although not necessarily similar to Underworld or Infinite Jest or some of robert coover’s big old books. it’s epic in that it covers swaths of time and ground but it’s also sort of an inward-facing epic, whose preoccupation is ultimately focused on human rather than historical analogues, and it goes down and down and down into matters of self and identity using objects like books and mirrors as physical stand-ins for these abstractions where everything is shifting; cities built either on sand or water, and you either adapt to these changes as adroitly as stanley the con man, or you risk losing yourself or your sanity or your purpose or something equally vital.
The events of the past week, he says, are perhaps best likened to an obscure codex with a broken spine, the contents of which have been scattered everywhere. All interested parties possess a few pages, but only the book’s author knows the whole. Indeed, even the author himself may have forgotten.
it’s a big puzzle box of a book, and while i know i didn’t figure out every single bit of it (damn you, crivano!!), i’m positive this is a book that is even more exciting on the second go-round, when you have a nice fatty layer of knowledge to cushion you and you know where its secrets live. **
some of the echoes are gigantic and obvious to the extent that i rolled my eyes at first and thought oh, jeez:
-crivano’s story takes place in 16th century venice, italy.
-stanley’s story takes place in venice beach, ca in the beatnik fifties.
-curtis’ story takes place in the venice casino in vegas in the 21st century.
-venice is the birthplace of wondrous glass and mirrorworks.
-stanley’s last name (although pseudonymous) is glass. (which has its own inescapable salingerian associations)
-curtis has a very intimate connection to an object made of glass.
curtis is physically tracking stanley in the “present” while stanley is, in the 50’s, spiritually tracking crivano by reading and rereading adrian welles’s book The Mirror Thief, which is the name of the book you yourself are reading and all. lines. blur.
but all those big clumsy-feeling echoes are just there to mark the territory, like grecian columns in the vegas desert. they just remind the reader to stay vigilant because here be callbacks, the existence of which any postmodern kid who reads the word “mirror” is already hip to, but still – it’s always good to remember that a reader is part of the process of storytelling, and frequently an easy mark in a long(ish), amicable con.
Stanley reads The Mirror Thief. It’s a book of poems, but it tells a story: An alchemist and spy called Crivano steals an enchanted mirror, and is pursued by his enemies through the streets of a haunted city. Stanley long ago stopped paying the story any mind. He’s come to regard it as a fillip at best, at worst as a device meant to conceal the book’s true purpose, the powerful secret it contains. Nothing, he’s quite certain, could be so obscure by accident
it’s also got some of the best writing about las vegas this side of The Goldfinch:
The city is always changing. Always, just for the sake of doing it. And that’s why it’s always the same. Get it? That’s its nature, its essence. Invisible. Pure. Formless. Indestructible…. Places become defined by what they lose. Once it’s gone, it’s eternal. Everything you see down there – everything! – is on its way out. Everything self-destructs. I mean, fuck Rome. This is the eternal city. Pure concept.
for a debut, even a debut that took more than ten years to get here***, his writing is crisp and clear, it’s incredibly propulsive, it’s full of little nuggets and peeps into unrelated worlds – beat poetry, professional gambling, street life, military and police tactics, con artists, 16th century venice, conspiracies, while wrapping them all in these larger and more familiar human universalities, to the extent that one might be tempted to add richard powers to that list of NAMES, just for the facility with which he handles these very specialized and disparate knowledge-pockets.
it’s a great book. i loved it enough to know i will likely read it again, and i also confess to having a little book-crush on stanley and someone needs to fanfic me some tales please.
Of course, he thinks. Of course it would happen like this.
* and this is why booksellers and librarians should always be the ones doing the readalike lists – and i am absolutely willing to be hired for this or in any other readers’ advisory-type position. please hire me for things. i am smart and restless and poor.
** like, for example, when the very next book i read after this was Dodgers, and i came across the word and definition for “albedo,” there was a nice rush of “ohhhhh!”
*** i thought this story was kind of interesting – you gotta scroll down to the part actually about this book, but you should also read about the other forthcoming titles at your leisure because some of them sound really good and because you like books.
