Though flashbacks are currently a fashionable novelistic tactic, this bold American debut makes unusual historical jumps. Starting 13 years ago in the Las Vegas of 2003, it then reverses to California in 1958 and Venice in 1592, subsequently alternating sections from these eras.
While the publishers have understandably cited the epoch-crossing novels of David Mitchell as a comparison point, the characters and narratives in the three time zones of The Mirror Thief are more formally linked than the sections of a Mitchell book such as Cloud Atlas.
In the most recent portions of the story, on the eve of the second Gulf war, a retired veteran of the first attack on Saddam Hussein is on some sort of civilian mission around the Vegas gaming tables. Curtis is searching for Stanley Glass, a super-gambler who has fleeced casinos using a system of probability calculation. Glass claims to have derived this from The Mirror Thief, a poetry collection by Adrian Welles, a fictional Los Angeles Beat poet who became friendly with Ezra Pound when the fascist-sympathising writer was confined in an asylum.
The sections set in the 50s show the young Glass coming under the influence of Welles, whose cult book tells the story of Crivano, who became involved in a Venetian scandal over the making of mirrors. Turning the page to a subsection date-stamped “1592”, the reader expects to get the historical background to the Welles poems, and is not disappointed.
As might be expected, a book called The Mirror Thief, with one character called Glass and another who is a pioneer of looking-glass technology, the text is filled with reflections. Speakers are regularly distracted by seeing miniature versions of themselves in the spectacles or pupils of an interlocutor; they stop to watch an image of the sun or the moon caught on water, or are ambushed byshadows.
The different historical sections also echo each other. There is a St Mark’s Square in each narrative, with the Venetian piazza mirrored in an area of California’s Venice Beach named in its honour and an ersatz Italy created as a tourist attraction for Vegas gamblers. Examples of deceit and concealment - in politics, relationships, literature and card games - constantly reflect each other in a narrative in which Curtis’s perception that “the whole world might be a big blackjack game” lands with the clang of an organising metaphor.
The prose is stethoscopically alert to rhythm. The 2003 and 1958 sequences are written in a staccato present tense: “The keycard slides; Curtis steps into his room. There’s a rasp along the tile.”
This tone becomes metronomic, hypnotic, although those adjectives would be stretching it for Seay. Even lengthy sentences tend to be made from short words. Frequently reminiscent of the ominous historical bulletins of Don DeLillo, these recent sections contrast with a plusher, plumper register, more redolent of Umberto Eco, employed for the far past: “His disposition is somewhat choleric - Crivano dreads the task of pacifying him.”
Seay is clearly a writer of exceptional and eclectic intelligence. Topics under consideration range from why bingo is a fascist game, through penetrating reflections on the poetry of Ezra Pound and techniques of glass-making, to the visual resemblance between the French philosopher Michel Foucault and the Greek-American actor Telly Savalas.
Perhaps most risky is a riff on what it means to “like” a book, with a writer rebuking a reader for using this criterion. The enthusiastic early readers quoted on the cover possibly took this as ironic, although it may alternatively be a warning that Seay isn’t interested in writing any kind of Gone Guy. But, although sometimes tough to like, The Mirror Thief is always highly admirable.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd.
