ike deep waters which only seem to move when you look away from the watch within the stream, Jeffrey Ford's new novel is at first glance entirely silent of intent, wholesomely naive of time, a Territory to bathe in like Huck. It is easy to be fooled. The Girl in the Glass may purport to be the first-person narrative of the adventures of a 17-year-old lad in Depression-ridden 1932, two feet short of the well of FDR, but in fact, as the prologue makes explicit, the main body of the novel comprises a manuscript written in 1999 by an 84-year-old man stirred by the sight of a butterfly (butterfly sightings have served to signal significant moments more than once in Jeffrey Ford's work) into remembering certain events that shaped his life 67 years earlier. His name is Diego. He has been spending his last years in a rest home in Mexico. He does not take his medication. He addresses us directly, in a pretense that he is transparent to his tale, as though it were deep waters that only happened to be him:
Decades have since died and been laid to rest, not to mention loved ones and personal dreams, but still that distant time materializes before me like a restless spirit at a seance, insisting its story be told. Of course, now with pen in hand, I have no choice but to be a medium to its truths. All I ask is that you believe.
Sure. What he asks us to believe is what any charlatan (or storyteller) asks us to believe. What he asks us to believe is that the story is telling him, not the other way round.
Young Diego was a young man of Mexican birth in the United States at a time when Mexicans were being deported in the false belief that they were taking jobs from proper Americans at a time—1932 was the deep heart of the Great Depression—when the 20th century was taking its first real bite out of America. As a small child, he was taken on by a con man named Thomas Schell, who specializes in "spiritualist" seances, using his remarkable powers of observation to persuade his rich customers on the North Shore of Long Island that his knowledge of their secret selves is supernatural. Schell's giant assistant, whose nom de guerre is Antony Cleopatra, provides muscle when necessary, and raw wisdom. Diego, dressed as a Hindu sage named Ondoo, provides a mytificating aroma of sage. It is all more or less what we might expect, except for two things: the elderly Diego's absolutely steady hand at the tiller of telling uncannily matches Schell's almost impersonal and weirdly serene near-omnicompetence: it is almost as though Schell were himself secretly writing Diego's tale, but this is not Gene Wolfe country, despite the invariant luminousness of Diego's confessional narrative, and Schell is not in any supratextual sense Diego. Something is going on, though. Could it be as simple as the feel of the Past Recovered?
Recognizing the mirror's face
Then the plot begins to move. A ghost girl in a mirror awakens Schell from his serenity, from his "knowledge" that the mysteries he concocts—that the mysteries of living in America in 1932—that the Mysteries of Life itself—are expungeable in the light of reason. Haunted by the vision in the mirror, which he soon realizes matches the physical description of a young girl who has gone missing, Schell steps outside the light and inveigles the girl's rich parents into giving him access to them, with the notion that he will be able to apply his powers of deconstruction to the seemingly supernatural mystery, that he will find the girl intact and recover his own certitude that the world can be understood. (Although he is anything but passive, and does clearly merit Schell's trust in him as an acute student in the praxis of flim-flam, the first half of Diego's confession is all the same governed almost entirely by the actions of Schell, the full man that the 17-year-old is an imago of.) In the course of conning the girl's parents into letting him help them, Schell encounters a woman so pale she is almost albino, and falls in love with her at the same time that she guides his team to the shack in the woods where the girl's mutilated body is found.
The ostensible plot becomes at this point slightly agitated, a bit crittercam Doctorow, as though the author (the real author, Jeffrey Ford) had dreams of selling The Girl in the Glass to the movies. The Ku Klux Klan makes an historically verifiable appearance, as does an equally historical ginger group called the Eugenics Record Office, which, fueled by Henry Ford and others, advocated the Aryanization of America. The near-albino, whose name is Morgan, turns out to be the twin of a near-albino monster named Merlin, whose strength and speed are (very nearly, or actually) superhuman; they are the outcome of enforced experiments in the breeding of twins on the part of the mad Dr. Agarias, a (fictional) scientist with the ERO. As in most well-constructed action stories, the uncovering of these various elements and characters creates a fog of unknowing, which it is the task of the protagonist(s) to dissolve. But Schell has been bemused by the girl in the glass, and then is kidnapped. Halfway through his confession, it almost seems that what Diego is going to have to tell us is that it all falls apart: the father, the light that bathes the flim-flam and the butterflies (see below) in radiance, the Past itself.
In the nick of time, however, Diego is made Boss by Antony Cleopatra, with one mission: to rescue Schell. A Seven Samurai assemblage of "freaks" and con artists is soon convened, and the plot gets all its ducks in a row and shoots them. It is all very neat. All the outcomes we could secularly dream of cash out before our eyes—Ford proves to be exceedingly deft at the surprisingly difficult art of putting actions into words—and Schell's passionate investment in explicating the world seems entirely justified, even though a few notes of vastation—of a sense that the terrible world uncovered by Diego's game spelunkers somehow means to tear us apart, that Auschwitz is a grin of the world—do seep through the satisfactions of deconstructive closure:
"I've seen that monster before," he [one of the Seven Samurai] said.
"Merlin?" asked Schell.
"No," he said. "That was a man. I mean the Monster. It never seems to die. We killed a lot of men tonight, but we didn't even wound the Monster."
The Monster is of course the Serpent's Egg of Ingmar Bergman: a skein through which the world, continuing to give birth, can be scryed.
Pinning the butterfly of story
There is also Brogan, a kind of idiot savant librarian who predicts exactly the course of the 20th century. And there is the girl in the glass. Antony Cleopatra's claim (made late in the book, in an epilogue years later) that Schell had only pretended to see her, that he had used the "vision" to hornswoggle his beloved Diego into a better life, founders on Diego's own narrative, which makes a mundane reading of the vision pretty well impossible to fabricate. At the very least there is an equipoise here between the mundane and the meaningful-in-terms-of-story that there seems little point in niggling at; at the best, The Girl in the Glass is magic.
And there are the butterflies. Schell collects them. They fly loose in the "Bugatarium" at the heart of his ample house, whose location is a mystery. They represent (to be sure) change and growth and stuff; but at the same time they are, just as the sandcastle fairy in Ford's superb "The Annals of Eelin-Ok" (2004) does much more than represent the world in a day with supernatural dignity, for he is the world in a day, and his dignity is to know it. So with the butterflies who weave the carpet of story of The Girl in the Glass, for they appear whenever this sad stately fine tale addresses more than one world. They appear whenever The Girl in the Glass becomes as necessary as Diego insists by telling it; whenever, in other words, it hovers to our eyes like something being born.
