Conjuring stories

Daniel Wallace's novel is full of delightful and offbeat characters

'Magic." Just to say the word is to invite attention, hope and some derision. Because of magic's preposterous claims -- The magician will show us what cannot be shown! He will do what cannot be done! -- the magician's audience tends to be especially unstable, holding together extremes of desire: those who yearn to escape the chains of common existence and those determined to prove that no escape is possible. They sit elbow to elbow, the debunkers and the true believers. Sometimes they're almost as interesting as the magician. Sometimes they're more interesting.

Daniel Wallace draws on just this unruly fervor at the opening of his new novel, "Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician." Henry Walker, the Negro magician rounding out the geeks and cast-offs that make up Jeremiah Mosgrove's Chinese Circus in 1954, is on stage, performing his act. It is very bad, but that's fine with this crowd. "A white magician who performed as Henry did -- fumbling his cards, accidentally smothering a bird in his jacket -- would have been a sad and pathetic display of ineptitude. But Henry, the Negro Magician -- the extremely unmagical Negro magician -- well, it was comedy, and the crowds could not get enough of it." In particular the three young white men in the front row can't get enough of it. This is their third night here, and they have plans for Henry after the show, plans meant to show what they think of a black man wearing a top hat and pretending he can fool white folks.

Sure enough, after the show that even Henry's best friend has to acknowledge as "an amazing, colossal failure," the men are waiting. But before they can carry him away, another circus member appears -- Rudy, the Strongest Man in the Entire World. Sizing up Henry's alarming situation in a glance, he drapes a meaty arm around his friend and begins to tell the story of how Henry acquired his powers, the story Henry himself once told Rudy, a story "not factual," he says with tantalizing mystery, "but true."

And thus, neatly, does Wallace distract our eye. For all the enticing trappings of the circus world and the alluring promise of magic, "Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician" is a story about storytelling -- its own kind of magic, as any reader knows. This is territory familiar to Wallace and his fans. His first novel, the very well-received "Big Fish," was a witty exploration of family, myth and jokes told as a series of tall tales, a fish story in the loosest, loopiest sense. The novels that followed -- "The Watermelon King" and "Ray in Reverse"-- have similarly been concerned with representation through stories, so infinitely mutable, so delightfully open to change.

We also get to know Henry Walker, the bad, tragic magician. There is the story about how he loses his father, but is then taken in by another kind of father, who gives Henry a new identity. There is the story of how he is the toast of New York after the war. There is the story about him bringing back his beloved Marianne, less magician's assistant than muse, from the dead. Above all, again and again, there is the story of how he made his beloved sister disappear and spent the rest of his life searching for her.

The stories are told about him, not by him. Rudy cannot stop telling Henry's stories, nor can Jeremiah Mosgrove, nor Jenny, the Ossified Girl, nor Carson Mulvaney, the private eye. Their stories swirl on top of one another, sometimes colliding, but agreeing on certain points: Henry did learn his magic from the devil. He did bring a woman back from the dead. He was not exactly a Negro magician. He was the greatest magician who ever lived, and a tragic man, and he lives on not for his magic, but because they yearn to keep telling his story.

Remote, beautiful and now left only with the scraps of his once-terrible power, Henry is a troubling figure. What is an entertainer who refuses to entertain? What is a magician who attempts to amaze us, but who keeps dropping the cards and fumbling with the scarves? What is a storyteller who shies away from telling his own story?

"Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician" poses these intriguing questions but does not investigate them. Too solemn to be quite comic, too filled with winks and misdirection to feel realistic, it holds back from exploring its murky suggestions about race, patrimony and, above all, loss. Instead, Wallace crowds his canvas with a highly sympathetic cast of outcasts and the afflicted inhabiting a world that, as is usual with his fiction, is entertainingly offbeat. The book is often delightful, filled with details and oddities to make readers gawk. Only later, after the show is over, is there time for us to ponder the disturbing sense of a story hinted at and then gone in a flash.

(Erin McGraw is the author of four books of fiction.)