First Fiction

“I didn’t invent sugar or flour, but I bake a mean apple pie.” So says magician Charles Carter, vouching for the originality of his act. The same could be said of Glen David Gold, the author of this wildly entertaining interpretation of the real-life Carter’s extraordinary career. There are shades here of E.L. Doctorow, Stephen Millhauser and Caleb Carr in the way Gold creates a foreboding, dreamlike aura of Americana. But like his subject, Gold builds upon the craft of his predecessors to give us something wonderfully his own.

Practicing his craft during magic’s pre-Depression Golden Age, Carter seems poised to become a symbol of modernity. But as his act becomes ever more elaborate and elephantine (quite literally), we realize that each new trick only confirms that Carter is destined to become hopelessly anachronistic.

Meanwhile, Carter’s trajectory leads him to a monumental collision with history: President Warren G. Harding attends Carter’s show the night before his suspicious death, volunteering to participate in an illusion called “Carter Beats the Devil.” As a bumbling Secret Service agent zeroes in on Carter, Gold creates an exuberant feeling of expectation and mystery, cramming this novel, like a thrilling three-act magic show (the unavoidable metaphor here), with misdirections, vanishings and potentially deadly secrets.

THE SAVAGE GIRL, By Alex Shakar, HarperCollins: 278 pp., $26

If for nothing else, Alex Shakar’s first novel deserves to be remembered for a brilliant concept: “paradessence.” Examples: The paradessence of coffee is that it offers both stimulation and relaxation; the paradessence of ice cream is that it embodies both eroticism and innocence. It’s an analytic tool wielded like a scalpel by the trend spotters and marketers who populate this dystopian, Donald Antrim-like vision of a world run amok with commodification.

Shakar’s Middle City is exploding with brand names; it’s a place that could be the future, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s an ingeniously skewed version of the present. It’s here that Ursual Van Urden learns the theory of paradessence from Chas Lacoutre, the top man at the trend-spotting firm of Tomorrow, Ltd. The savage girl in question is an urban primitive spotted by the enterprising Ursula, who is immediately taken by the girl’s fashion sense (she has a way with pelts) and by her skill at stalking, killing and skinning animals. The image of the savage girl becomes the key to Ursula’s marketing campaign for a brand of diet water. Shakar’s frighteningly smart take on an advertising-drenched society--in which marketing concepts are adhered to the way Marxists once lined up behind dialectical materialism--was inspired by an old article from Spy magazine.

If there’s a paradessence to “The Savage Girl,” it’s that, much like Spy itself, the book seems to be secretly in love with all the not-so-sacred cows it intends to demolish. And yet this only makes Shakar’s bleak vision that much more real and unforgiving.

BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS, By Dai Sijie, Translated from the French by Ina Rilke, Alfred A. Knopf: 202 pp., $18

Dai Sijie’s debut novella is an unexpected miracle--a delicate, and often hilarious, tale set amid the ham-fisted brutalities of the Cultural Revolution. It’s about two best friends--”city youths” from bourgeois families--who, in the early 1970s, are sent off to the mountains to be “re-educated” by the local peasants. Sijie’s nameless teenage narrator--along with his best friend, Luo--find themselves in a China they’re ill-equipped to deal with, where something as innocent as a violin is taken for a potentially dangerous artifact from another planet. (The narrator is made to perform a piece for the villagers that--for purposes of personal safety--Luo audaciously renames “Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao.”)

In this rainy outback, the boys somehow stumble upon a hidden suitcase full of banned books--a treasure trove of forbidden fruit by the likes of Flaubert, Zola, Gogol, Melville and, of course, Balzac (known in Chinese as “Ba-er-zar-ke”). The books ignite the boys’ sense of romance and awareness of the world at large, and Luo sets about using their elaborate plot lines to woo the beautiful, enigmatic Little Seamstress--a “lovely mountain girl in need of culture.”

We read Sijie’s exquisite sentences (which improbably bridge the gap between China and France) with close to the same wonderment that the boys experience leafing through such potent contraband as “Pere Goriot” and “Madame Bovary”--of new worlds opening up, of realms of possibility regained.