The Girl in the Glass - Jeffrey Ford

The Girl in the Glass is a book about conmen, conspiracies, crackpots, and carneys. The story follows three conmen who work on Long Island during the Great Depression putting on fake seances for the rich and powerful. During a botched seance, the leader of the group, a wise and experienced grifter called Schell, sees a vision of the ghost of a young girl in a pane of glass. Schell discovers that the girl is the kidnapped daughter of a millionaire and decides to use his knowledge of human nature and powers of observation to find the girl under the pretense of his psychic powers. Diego, a 17 year old illegal Mexican adopted by Schell and trained to pretend as an Indian swami, narrates the case as his own coming-of-age story. Girl in the Glass is very clever, very funny, and very exciting.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, but I kept expecting it to be something it wasn't. I've been a fan of Jeffrey Ford's since his debut novel, The Physionomy, was published. His previous novels are weird fantasies that toy with perception, identity, and the relationship between narrator, story and audience. As a result, each of his novels have a feverish dreamlike quality, none more so than his masterful The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque. In Charbuque, a painter is offered a large sum of money to paint an accurate portrait of a woman he can speak with but never see directly. The novel, set in turn-of-the-20th-century New York, must have whet Ford's appetite for historical fiction and set up the idea for Girl in the Glass. Although Girl includes the weird and fantastic, the perspective is always from backstage where the reader can see the trickery and slight-of-hand exposed. This is Ford's turn into the literary mainstream, and although it is a straightforward mystery novel (if mysteries can ever be considered straightforward), on its own merits it is a very fine book.

The book's narrator, Diego, is Ford's most appealing character from any of his books, and in fact, all of the principal characters here are strong and likeable enough to serve in sequels, should Ford decide to ever revisit the idea of conmen as psychic detectives. There are some profoundly memorable sequences as well, such as the carnival side-show funeral and the first passage into Schell's bugatorium, an indoor garden devoted to raising and breeding butterflies of all types. The butterfly serves as the novel's central metaphor, a transitional creature emerging from the chrysalis. On its own, the symbolism is somewhat facile, but Ford adds his own sense of irony, giving the characters a chance to explain their own interpretations of the meaning of butterflies, but in doing so, Ford rejects each of them in turn for a deeper meaning. The butterfly is a creature that cannot be seen for all that it is at once. It is always only a part of its self, and that is the deeper meaning of the con, visible only in parts.