Daniel Wallace. Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
Daniel Wallace’s newest novel, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, ranges widely across circus backlots, the battlefields of World War II, and the small towns of the South. Like his most popular book, Big Fish, Mr. Sebastian is an enjoyable but slight yarn about magic and family, and as with Big Fish, I found the reading experience simultaneously diverting and disappointing.
The novel’s early scenes are its strongest. Henry Walker, the Negro Magician, plies his trade in one of the smaller tents of Jeremiah Mosgrove’s Chinese Circus. (Actual Chinese people in this circus: 0.) His act is a curious one: Henry is an incompetent magician, and his consistently disappointing performance quells the anxieties and confirms the prejudices of the predominantly white crowds who don’t exactly flock to see him, attracted by the novelty of a black prestidigitator. Wallace’s description of the act—of Henry’s desperation and wounded dignity, of the slowly mounting contempt and hostility of his crowds—is beautifully done, evoking an unspoken, tragic history and hinting at perils to come.
But, as we learn early on (so this isn’t really a SPOILER), Henry was not always incompetent or black—and the story of how he came to be both unfolds over the course of the novel. Unfortunately, Henry’s story doesn’t quite live up to the expectations that Wallace creates in that first scene. Reading Mr. Sebastian feels like reading a partly developed outline for a much better novel. I felt this way about Big Fish, too, so it may simply be that there’s something about Wallace’s approach to fiction that I’m just not getting or that just doesn’t click with me; I certainly don’t want to criticize the novel simply for being a different sort of novel than I want it to be.
But: Maybe part of the problem is that I’m not sure what sort of novel it is meant to be. Here we have a narrative that encompasses magicians and sideshows and child abductions and the South; to do justice to the narrative’s grand scope would require a rich development of setting and character, but ultimately the novel feels thin and undernourished. The whimsical, fable-like storytelling of Big Fish made sense since Big Fish was a novel about, in many ways, storytelling and whimsy; mimesis was never part of the plan, and that was clear from the beginning, so it didn’t really matter if the world seemed to exist primarily for the protagonists. One might assume Mr. Sebastian to be in a similarly fabulistic vein—it’s about magic and illusion, after all. In fact, however, it announces itself as a kind of detective story, which has rather different ground rules. Now, I’m fine with a detective story in which all testimonies are false and no one ever solves anything. My critique is not of the novel’s resolution (or lack of same) but of its world: A mystery, even one starring creatures of myth and fancy, needs a thick milieu; it’s fundamentally a social genre. Despite the real history and social context that the novel’s settings evoke, despite the large cast of characters (who are meant really to exist in the real world of the novel), Mr. Sebastian still reads like a fairy tale: There’s just enough world there to move the story along from A to B to C, and no more.
The plot itself is rich in incident but does not always engage the reader; the narrative moves ahead without much sense of urgency and without venturing much about Henry as a character or the nature of magic or race in America or love or death or sisters or circuses or freakishness. Each section is narrated by a different character—an unglamorous private eye, an ossified girl, a former human bear, Henry’s dead mother—but aside from some framing material at the beginning and end of each chapter, each narrator becomes nearly indistinguishable from the last. (The private eye is the most notable exception.) That failure to differentiate the voices is the book’s biggest flaw: We get a different piece of Henry’s story from each character (pieces which may or may not be true), but there’s little sense of how their very different life experiences might have shaped their impressions of Henry.
As with Incognegro, I think my frustration with Mr. Sebastian results more from a feeling of missed opportunity than anything else: It’s not a bad book; it just doesn’t live up to the promise of its premise and of its early pages.
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Big Fish left me a little flat, too, but your description of the plot makes this book intriguing. Maybe if one braces oneself for disappointment?
That should absolutely be on the paperback cover: “Brace yourself for disappointment!”