HOCUS POCUS

Absorbing historical fiction concerning the havoc swirling around a magician in 1816 Boston.

The 25-year-old calling himself Samuel Thomas arrives in Boston full of ambition. Abandoned at birth in India, Samuel was initially adopted by an Indian family of magicians who taught him their craft. Sent to a British-run orphanage and mentored by a British officer, Samuel ended up in England, where he perfected his skills. Quietly elegant, intensely charismatic Samuel is now discovered by Walter Mepham, a foppish but charming dreamer whose New Boston Museum houses a collection of oddities. His eccentric chatter is filled with “linguistic bric-a-brac,” literary allusions that would be pretentious offered by the author, but coming from Walter are fun, even touchingly revealing. The museum, reluctantly funded by his wealthy Puritan father-in-law, needs a new attraction to stay afloat. Samuel’s magic act is the answer, especially when the museum uses Samuel’s uncertain racial lineage to market him in the exotic persona of a fakir. Samuel’s onstage magic never fails, but over the course of the (historically accurate) aberrantly cold summer, lives go awry. There are deaths, addictions, disappearances. Charlatans, peculiar museums, bookish Boston blue bloods, and homoeroticism often turn up in novels about 19th-century America, but Charry combines those ingredients into a fresh literary experience. The witty, decorous tone stays true to the time, and Boston comes to life as a vigorous city full of contradictions. The push and pull of several overlapping love triangles shows how easily love can become obsession, whether the target is human (Samuel), object (Noah Webster’s new dictionary), or idea (the “Great Indian Rope Trick”). Nuances of race relations in a city proud of its abolitionist stance are explored through reactions to a Black child’s abduction, while Samuel struggles with the permeability of identity itself.

Eschewing fantasy or quirkiness, Charry creates a rare sense of wonder plus gravitas.