LIT REVIEW: The Art of Disappearing

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LIT REVIEW: The Art of Disappearing

POSTED: Friday, October 30, 2009, 3:23 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

St. Martin's, 320 pp., $24.99, Sept. 17

Read a few pages of The Art of Disappearing and you're caught. This may be her first novel, but Ivy Pochoda proves herself a master at weaving her own type of magic, enchanting us into a world both ethereal and grounded, beautiful and gritty. When I first read the description ' it's about a young woman, Mel Snow, who meets and falls in love with a magician named Toby Warring, whose talent is more than just smoke and mirrors ' I was a bit skeptical. Another novel about magic? How many times can we immerse ourselves in the worlds of Harry Potters and Bella Swans before the fairy dust starts irritating our eyes?

But after a few chapters, I realized that this novel takes magic in an entirely different direction. These characters are adults living in adult worlds. Mel is a traveling textile designer ' a random profession for a protagonist if I ever saw one ' and seems to work her own kind of magic with fabrics, able to hear a unique song in each piece of cloth she encounters. She meets Toby in a Nevada saloon, where an instant connection leads them to an abrupt Vegas wedding. Darkly handsome and brimming with real magic, Toby continually weaves his illusions for Mel and for others, but only she knows that his magic is no trick. His skills never cease to fascinate: He changes white wine to red, conjures dancing shapes out of swirling sands, stops a bullet midflight and ultimately finds a way to create alternate realities. But Toby comes to Mel already laden with a heavy past, when one of his tricks went wrong and he made his assistant disappear for good. For a time, the newlyweds forge a happy life in Vegas, with Toby performing his magic shows and Mel designing fabrics; but it doesn't last, and once again one of Toby's tricks go drastically wrong.

This second failure haunts Toby even more than the first, with his demons chasing him all the way to Amsterdam, where he and Mel take up with a secret society of old magicians ' the last vestiges of real magic left in a world now all about trickery. As the magicians encourage Toby to pick up where they left off and delve into his craft, he and Mel grow farther and farther apart, leaving us wondering which is stronger: magic or love, tricks or reality.

One of the strongest draws of the novel is that you never fully understand the characters, from morbid teenager Greta (who follows Toby around Vegas) to Toby himself, in his inability to separate himself from his magic. Even Mel confuses us, both unsure of her hasty marriage and certain in her love for the magician, obsessed with finding her long-lost brother (a somewhat confusing side story within the novel). Though we stumble in the beginning, pieces of the characters' pasts begin to surface little by little, providing us with a patchy understanding.

It's that aura of mystery that glues us to Pochoda's beautiful, eerie writing that paints a world of illusion melting from Vegas to Amsterdam. Her scenes range from greasy Vegas diners and gaudy casinos to windswept desert plains, the strange blue glow of an aquarium at night, and bizarre Amsterdam burlesque carnivals. Her descriptions of textures are so rich they wrap around us like fabric itself. Though Pochoda might lose us a little in the complex threads of her story, especially with the flood of old magicians we're suddenly expected to keep track of in Amsterdam, it actually makes sense that a novel about magic doesn't quite make sense.

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