The Grand Complication
by Allen Kurweil
Theia Books

Excerpted in the 1996 Best of Young American Novelists issue of Granta, which anticipated the career successes of such contemporary luminaries as Lorrie Moore and more recently, Jonathan Franzen, Allen Kurzweil's "The Grand Complication" was at that time a novel in progress and has, presumably, been in the shop ever since. Readers will simultaneously wish the book had been left to percolate just a bit longer and marvel that a writer could produce such an impeccably crafted literary joke. That is, if they make it through to the end.

What was striking about the excerpt published by Granta as "Slips of Love" remains the unfulfilled promise of Kurzweil's book. That excerpt — and the beginning of the novel it ultimately became — focused on the narrator, a reference librarian named Alexander Short and his eccentric wife, a French artist named Nic, who crafts pop-up books and listens to Edith Piaf. They have an intriguingly idiosyncratic big-city life and though Kurzweil bestows on Nic any number of silly, ostensibly French mannerisms, she seems to have the stuff to rise above cliché, but Kurzweil (and his narrator) give her short shrift in favor of the book's other light, a flaneur named Henry James Jesson.

The plot of "The Grand Complication" is indeed grand, complicated stuff — Jesson enlists his local librarian, Short, in a quest to uncover the Grand Complication, a finely crafted watch designed by a famous horologist for Marie Antoinette. This search leads Short down the rabbit hole, displacing Nic and causing any number of predictable marital problems. Soon enough, though, it is revealed that all is not as it seems — Jesson is too good to be true and the quest proceeds at too brisk a pace to be entirely legitimate. The balance of power parallels James Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (an allusion that Kurzweil practically beats into those readers who proceed past page 100) insofar as Short, the sideman, soon becomes the catalyst of the plot and the only truly active participant in the quest, mirroring how, in Boswell's seminal biography of Samuel Johnson, the biographer ultimately emerged as powerful a presence as his subject.

At a certain point Kurzweil does accomplish the deft trick of substituting the book that is "The Grand Complication" for the artifact of the same name. Readers disposed to enjoying this sort of conceit, generally termed "postmodern" but in Kurzweil's hands more intriguing than a simple ontological inversion, will probably enjoy the book. That said, readers shouldn't expect the honed iciness of Vladimir Nabokov or Italo Calvino. That's not a flaw because Kurzweil doesn't really aspire to that territory, but it's hard to imagine an ideal reader for this book — perhaps a littérateur who devours genre mysteries? "The Grand Complication" is conniving, and it is constructed in a manner that might appeal to the aesthete, but the flat, even sometimes racist characterizations such as that of the stoic Indian library guard, will only seem inventive to readers surprised by the novelty of British dowagers and guilty butlers.

One of the most striking things about this book is the light it casts on the mysterious world of librarians. "The Grand Complication" is a bibliophile's book for a hundred different reasons, and readers who swoon over detailed descriptions of the inner workings of a library will readily forgive the novel's shortcomings. In fact, such readers are probably Kurzweil's intended audience, his own version of Salinger's infamous fat lady — they'll devour the book, possibly in one sitting, and remember it not as a convoluted quasi-mystery but as a love letter to literature. Ultimately, it's only in memory that the book will resonate because — most tellingly of all — it's not the sort of book readers are likely to pick up off the shelf again.

— Rumaan Alam (rumaanalam@hotmail.com)