An excellent premise, but the story lacks magic.
Illusionists in Victorian England take center stage in Thomas’ latest romance (Constance, 2013, etc.).
Devil Wix is more ambitious than his fellow entertainers and wants to do more than eke out a hand-to-mouth existence. The captivating showman dreams of managing his own theatrical company and is willing to go to almost any lengths to achieve his goal. Following a chance encounter, Devil teams up with resourceful dwarf Carlo Bonomi, and the act thrives when the partners present a gory illusion each evening at the run-down Palmyra Theater in London's East End. Soon, the pair ally themselves with Heinrich, a strange Swiss inventor obsessed with automata; Jasper, a wax sculptor and childhood friend who’s privy to Devil’s darkest memory; and art student/life model Eliza, an aspiring actress whose kindness and steely determination bind the diverse and often contentious group together. Eliza falls in love with Devil, much to Jasper’s disappointment, but Devil’s not used to dealing with a woman who demands respect. Outwitting his opponent in a card game, Devil gains ownership of the Palmyra and directs his efforts toward making the venue the foremost entertainment hub in the East End. As he discovers the formidable costs of refurbishing the theater and attracting a fickle public, Devil borrows money for renovations and publicity, auditions new acts to keep the show fresh and pays scant attention to the dangerous mental state of one member of the troupe. Thomas enthusiastically explores a unique subject and skillfully creates the sights, atmosphere and sensations of British theater during this era; but with each melodramatic event, the plot becomes wispier and wispier until it finally vanishes into thin air. Predictably, relationships, attitudes and the courses of lives change before the story takes one final gasp, but by then, even die-hard fans may find themselves struggling to get through the drawn-out tale.
An excellent premise, but the story lacks magic.Pub Date: June 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0990-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Pub Date: April 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-52356-9
Page Count: 322
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
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