The Club Dumas (1993)

There is a slim genre of literature that brings a unique joy to certain readers: the Nonexistent Book. A renowned example would be the Necronomicon, a "banned" and thus "scarce" centuries-old volume of occult knowledge (in the tradition of many great nonexistent books) which was wholly made up by pulp writer H.P. Lovecraft in the 1920s in order to lend verisimilitude to his tales of otherworldly beings who could be summoned by recitation of various passages. Belief in the Necronomicon's existence (and there are legions who will argue it vehemently) continues to this day, fostered in no small part by obscure houses who have published "excerpts" in paperback.

The labyrinthine plot of Arturo Perez-Reverte's novel The Club Dumas (translated to film with minimal effect by Roman Polanski as The Ninth Gate) revolves around just such a grimoire. Book detective Lucas Corso is hired to authenticate a manuscript fragment of The Three Musketeers, which has slipped into the possession of a dealer friend following the suicide (or perhaps murder) of its previous owner. Despite an edgy, streetwise, roguish exterior, Corso is not the kind of book scout seen at library sales or Goodwill racks; his clients are maniacally wealthy, his goods are pedigreed, and the transactions he enables are the sort documented only in behind-the-curtains auction house whispers, and which never make the papers.

Though the pacing is slowed during passages where Corso's "true" heart is examined (requisite brooding over a Lost Love; a haunting fascination with the strategic blunder of an ancestor on a Napoleonic battlefield), these excesses are quickly excused as his increasingly dangerous investigations into the validity of the Dumas fragment become intertwined with a seemingly unrelated quest: comparison of three existing copies of a famously rare demonic text: The Delomelanicon, or The Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows. The books each contain nine woodcut plates, but with cryptic variations; it is Corso's job to discover the nature of these variations, which are supposedly a key for summoning the granddaddy of evil, Satan himself.

The plot proceeds as a wild conundrum of literary associations: sinister characters appear, as if summoned from the pages of Dumas's masterpiece, as Corso proceeds to decipher differences among the existing copies of The Nine Doors. Popping up like a deus ex machina is a beautiful young girl named after a Conan Doyle heroine who pauses just long enough from reading the classics to rescue Corso from several perilous encounters. There are also entertaining diversions into the world of truly rare book collecting, including a terrific set piece involving the impish Ceniza Brothers, who work to restore, repair, and sometimes forge valuable volumes. Meanwhile, Corso finds himself investigating an ever-deepening series of puzzle-like coincidences linking the occult-obsessed author Dumas with the ultimate mystery of The Nine Doors…

Perez-Reverte isn't so much concerned with solving any mystery as he is with the structure of the puzzle itself, in this case how texts and characters and storylines, even seemingly simple ones, are interpreted and bestowed with independent vitality by readers. When Corso is finally initiated into the Club Dumas, the detective-novel machinations evaporate to reveal a larger force of operation: There are characters in literature who have a life of their own, familiar to millions of people who haven't even read the books in which they appear. This notion of literature existing outside the boundaries of the printed page and within the minds and lives of readers -- thus being capable of effecting events in our Real World -- is realized fully as the novel moves toward an unexpected and unsettling set of closing moments.

I won't be terribly surprised if at some future point, engaged in a search for some obscure book, I stumble across a catalog listing for a "facsimile reprint" of the 1666 Torchia edition of The Nine Doors. Perhaps, out of a perverse curiosity, I'll buy it. Or perhaps (more likely) I'll leave it for the next hungry scout, someone who just might believe he's buying the Real Thing. Readers who love fiction -- the characters, the plots, the romance and the intrigue -- inevitably carry that passion with them into the physical world. And there's a high end to the scale of that passion, Perez-Reverte is saying, and some people get the Devil they deserve.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Rare Volume: the Lure of Apocrypha," March 26 2000

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There is only one serious matter to be considered in life, and that is death.
Mankind will not be perfect until it can create and destroy like God. It can already destroy: that's half the battle.
     -- Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

California's Over (1997)

The title of Louis B. Jones' third novel initially gives the misleading impression of an intrinsically regional story, carrying no interest beyond the Sierra Nevada peaks. But this is a story of America, not merely California: the opening sequence cranks to a start in New York, at the George Washington Bridge, and drives us west on I-80, sightseeing across the across the fruited plains before finally ramping down onto the West Coast, the little town of Seawall, the terminal point where the narrative begins.

It's 1973, and the estate of James Farmican, a three-years-dead beat poet and literary idol to a generation recently passed, must be settled. The people left sorting through the debris, drifting from room to room in the gothic, doorless family mansion, are more ghostly than the departed writer who has bequeathed unto them this wreckage. Julia, the widow, has recently remarried Faro Ness, a pop-psychiatrist oblivious to his own creeping materialism, spouting anti-establishment pabulum even as he maneuvers to take control of the Farmican Estate. Her two children are: Peter, who dreams of living alone in the house after everyone else has relocated to Oregon, dreams of writing either an epic poem or an opera about the Donner Party but is stunted in his passion by a charming lack of focus and skill; and Wendy, ever on the lookout for her father's ashes which she had hidden in a TANG jar (now mysteriously mislaid), her sexual awakening disassociated in late-night junk food binges until the arrival of Baelthon, a local boy hired to help sort through the estate, since no actual member of the family can be bothered -- not even the prodigal stepson, Ed, arriving from Modesto upon word from Ness' lawyers that he may be inheriting the long-defunct (and essentially non-extant) Cornucopia Casino in Void, Nevada. Finally, rounding out this cast is the enigmatic Dean (or Merlin), a beat-generation holdover and former muse to James, now dwelling somewhere in the sub-basement, emerging briefly to issue cryptic instructions, or to perform seemingly meaningless marriage ceremonies. 

It is upon one of these marriages that the characters' fates, swinging across the chasm of years to our own 1999, finally hinges. The whole story is framed by the character of Baelthon, as he looks back upon those pivotal few days -- though the narrative perspective shifts, liquid and dreamlike, as needed, to illuminate each of the Farmicans in turn; California's Over is at once too delicate and too complex to be seen through a single set of eyes. And there is a profound psychic pull to Jones's narrative, whose main strength is his ability to cast language like a spell. He writes exactly the way we remember: in disarming, sensory flashes.

Which, of course, illuminate something larger. Jones's first two novels were virtuoso in balancing slick plots upon elegant structures and teetering symbolism. Though he continues to play interesting games of literary association, the true reward of this novel is simple and emotional. The story finds itself in small, ordinary moments as the characters clumsily negotiate the labyrinthine house, its contents, each other. They are fully realized, flesh-and-blood, the stuff-of-our-stuff. As the family shifts and divides, everyone making knowingly, comically, wrong decisions, it's impossible not to love them for their bad choices. In picking through the belongings of their martyred beatnik father and their ignored or deflected emotions associated with those belongings, the story of the Family Farmican becomes the story of how we came to be here, in the late 1990s, of the choices we made when the idealism of the 1960s crash landed, leaving as debris the Resignation of Nixon, the Fall of Saigon, the Family of Manson. Same as Pynchon's nastily accurate Vineland, which shares the use of a Remembered California as a springboard to Today's America, Jones's novel points a finger at all the empty assumptions by which we've come to live our lives -- not in grand ideological or social accusation, but rather in personal, hopeful indication, that we might see the responsibilities in our weaknesses and failures, and thereby realize the path already laid, towards redemption.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Illuminating Flashes," May 02 1999