A GEM THAT kept me guessing. The first sentence--"The day Paul Coral vanished, it snowed"--seems to come from mystery-thriller territory, and we are, indeed, going to learn what became of Paul Coral. But we also find out on the first page that Paul was the narrator's co-worker at a museum, a museum whose guards "had a fierce and litigious union," so we are going to being taking some side-trips into the genre of institutional satire (e.g., Sam Lipsyte's The Ask, Cate Dicharry's Fine Art of Fucking Up, and campus novels in general), and these too turn out to be entertaining.
But there's more. Our narrator, Stella Krakus, is going through a divorce, has a challenging relationship with her quite successful mother, and is trying to figure out the scope of a brief but tantalizing affair she had with an on-the-way-up colleague at the museum...so we have a "woman-at-a personal-crossroads novel going on as well.
But there's even more than that. Sorting through the documents left behind by the vanished Paul leads to several new investigative byways in the history of the museum and its donors that our narrator, with her Ph. D. in art history, is more than up to sleuthing through. So for a few chapters we are almost into Crying of Lot 49 territory, piecing together historical clues to a rhizome of inter-related stories about wealth, fantasy literature, feminism, the avant-garde, and art patronage from the 1820s to the 1950s.
This novel's Tristero, though, turns out to be more a message for Stella than a global conspiracy, a message Paul (before vanishing) left inscribed in the archive for her to discover, and it promises to get her out of the labyrinth and into something more like fresh air, slate scrubbed clean of butthead husbands and manipulative colleagues.
I hope Ives is going to keep writing poetry, but she also writes a dandy novel.
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