You can’t help but love the feats of thievery it describes—nabbing the sunglasses off someone’s face without them noticing, impressing a skeptical Penn Jillette to the point of profanity.

Plus there are the questions it raises about a career most of us have never considered: what kind of person would be so good at stealing things, and what kind of person would give those things back?

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Sean Rowe
Magic (Collar City)

It might be hard to get past the first song on Sean Rowe’s Magic it if you have a real aversion to guitar-based songs written in what is commonly referred to as “adult contemporary” style: competent music writing and playing, extending just to the edge of what is comfortable. In other words, it’s as risky as it can get without having to be risky. And while the music itself on Magic doesn’t transcend any musical boundaries, Rowe’s voice adds a complexity and uniqueness that distinguish the album.

Rowe sings in the deepest register I’ve ever heard for this genre of music. The only other singer I can think to compare Rowe to is Barry White, but the two employ such different styles of singing in such different musical contexts that any comparison would be unjust. Rowe’s voice is such a surprise that on first listen it can be off-putting to unprepared listeners. But this combination of deep baritone vocals and sentimental guitar rock creates the dark overtones that shadow this record.

That first song, “Surprise,” is the only certifiable love song on the record. Look up videos of Sean Rowe on YouTube, and you’ll find a bride and groom dancing their first dance to it. As Rowe sings “I thought love was just a strip mall baby, you are a surprise” I can’t help but be impressed by this cynicism cum romance. Rowe takes us swiftly through the notion that love is just a bland suburban oasis full of Subways and nail salons to our arrival at genuine sentiment. And while the rest of the record explores dynamic experiences beyond the initial relief of love, this song acts as an anchor for everything that follows.

Sean Rowe’s Magic is a place where “life is like a liquid,” where “hearts [are] waiting like rifles,” where “the sound of thunder covers up [your] eyes,” where “[you] listen hard for the voice of god and [you] don’t hear nothing at all,” where you begrudgingly ask questions like, “What if I was wrong? What if the world was right?” The tenor of Rowe’s vocals helps express a musical depth that could easily be passed over with a more conventional delivery. How else could one tolerate lyrics like “When your heart is broke, when your eyes are wet” sung over and over, or “I am man” sung with the utmost naked sincerity? Such clichéd phrasing and earnest observation usually repel me, but Rowe’s delivery wins me over. The songs on Magic present lyrical and emotional clichés as though there couldn’t have been a better way to say any of it.

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Mel is a traveling textile designer and salesperson, while Toby is a magician whose magic is more than an illusion: it’s a gift and a burden, and it becomes an obsession. While it’s true that the two meet cutely at a remote bar in the middle of the desert, the romance that ensues is anything but formulaic. That’s what makes Ivy Pochoda’s first novel, The Art of Disappearing, so captivating. It’s about love and magic, but it’s far from a Hollywood romance.

Exploring why Mel and Toby are so intensely drawn to each other is one of the book’s strongest threads—could Toby could have conjured Mel to his side? Are they predestined for each other? Is it just a coincidence? Whatever is at play, within 24 hours the two end up marrying in a Las Vegas wedding chapel and honeymooning at the Laughing Jackalope Motel.

Toby has dreams of making it big as a Vegas showman, but it soon becomes clear that his magic has consequences, both for him professionally and for his relationship with Mel. In some ways, his unusual magic makes him more vulnerable than most magicians, who rely on sleight-of-hand and illusion to captivate the audience. On the other hand, Toby’s gift allows him to shift reality in breathtaking ways. His talent is just as much a curse, since he doesn’t entirely understand it. After a trick has a disastrous outcome, and with a spurned couple from Toby’s past snooping around trying to sabotage his big break, the lovebirds leap from Vegas to Amsterdam, where a cadre of aging magicians urges Toby into their fold. In trying to make sense of things, manipulation becomes an obsession for Toby.

Ivy Pochoda

Throughout The Art of Disappearing, Pochoda toys with ideas of predestination and power dynamics in relationships. The union of Toby and Mel is a coupling of two profoundly talented individuals—since Mel is an inspired designer in her own right—but Toby’s craft is showier, and it’s rooted in public admiration. Mel has been damaged by a complicated relationship with her brother Max, who disappeared from her life twice when she was growing up; vivid flashbacks show that this is not the first time Mel has struggled to keep pace with a loved one who has his sights set on something not of this world.

As the story unfolds, the reader wonders if this talented woman is going down the well-trod path of so many wives subsumed by their husbands’ fame. As for Toby, the star of the show, will he always choose glory over love? Pochoda’s prose is colorful, light-filled, panoramic:

“Amsterdam seemed to me to be tinted with the last paint coaxed from the corners of a once-vivid watercolor palette. The sky that peeked between the gabled buildings was not the blue promised by the famous Delft tiles, but a blue that has been stretched thin, made gray with too much water.”

These descriptive, liquid scenes carry the reader along smoothly for a while, making the occasional abrupt scene change even more jarring. After one small, intimate conversation between Toby and Mel that seems to take place on a lonely road in the desert, they step out of the beat-up minivan, leave the keys, and we realize they’re at the airport, on their way to Amsterdam. Such set changes seem to happen at the wave of a wand, like magic, in keeping with the rhythm of the novel.

Though The Art of Disappearing has been compared to The Time Traveler’s Wife, Pochoda’s novel is, in some ways, more elaborate than Niffenegger’s—the prose is lusher, the characters more melancholy, the style more mysterious. Though the story takes place in the modern day, the action seems to take place outside of time—in an abandoned tract house from the 1960s, on a mesa in the Mojave desert, at a masquerade rave in the Amsterdam catacombs.

Toby’s magic is often mystifying, but in the same way that Mel’s conversations with fabric, and her brother Max’s symbiotic relationship to water, seem organic to the characters. The mechanics are not written to be analyzed and dissected—instead, readers are asked to suspend their disbelief and enjoy this tumultuous ride through marriage and ambition, loneliness and devotion, magic and reality.

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Reading such a dense novel can feel like being in the backseat of a car traveling nonstop through a safari, with a reader wanting to stop and poke around a bit, maybe get a little more explanation from the tour guide.

Imagine, for a moment, the prettiest lifeguard in town has vanished without a trace, and no one has a clue what happened to her—not her parents, not the police, not the creepy married guy who ogles her from the bushes, no one. It’s the kind of incident that makes your mind wander (wonder?); while the myth-making parts of our psyches would secretly like to believe she was swallowed up by the Earth or spontaneously combusted, chances are she just had some bad luck, and was run over in the middle of the night by a truck driven by an Allstate insurance agent moonlighting as a car thief.

Even though we yearn for magic and open-ended, X-Files-like explanations, more often than not, what we find in our day-to-day lives are fractured recollections, lack of information, and magic’s less-attractive stepchild: illusion. Scott Blackwood’s debut novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, provides glimpses of the magical as it reveals the illusions and chicaneries endemic to daily life. We Agreed to Meet is an expansion of the title story from Blackwood’s collection In the Shadow of Our House, which gets divided into four sections that form the backbone of the novel. At its heart is Odie Dodd, an aging physician who witnessed the Jonestown mass suicide in Guyana, and years later disappears from his home. Several other characters also perform disappearing acts over the course of the story, leaving the rest of the community to make sense of the human-shaped holes they’ve left behind.

In its many lyrical moments, We Agreed to Meet surprises and amazes with offhand factoids and tidbits of grotesquery and surrealism (some of the novel’s conspicuous preoccupations: ghosts, magic, dreams and hallucinations, Greek poets, and modern day curios of the fetus-in-fetu kind). At times, the plot and characters can feel like bombers delivering payloads of intellectual miscellany, including a crude summary of Aristophanes’ creation myth from Plato’s Symposium, a spiel about the Greek poet Simonides, an explanation of what photographers refer to as “magic hour,” and various anecdotes that might have been extracted from Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Blackwood intends to cast a mystifying glow on our perception of the world, but eventually these bits start to come across as inorganic and forced.

Scott Blackwood

Perhaps what we’re really encountering is misdirection. When Odie hallucinates that he’s telling Jim Jones about “Johan Hofzsinger… the greatest sleight-of-hand magician of the nineteenth century,” the novel exposes, perhaps inadvertently, its own aspirations and tactics, giving readers something shiny to look at in the form of tidbits and lyrical surrealism, distracting us from the shadowy movements going on in the background. Still, the novel’s shiniest moments leave a reader wide-eyed. In one such moment, Natalie, the nubile lifeguard, fantasizes about rescuing a deaf child from a pool and reuniting him with his classmates. The ensuing, frantic signing of the students to one another is breathtakingly poignant and, well, magical: “All around them, dozens of his school friends squat in the shadowy grass and begin to sign. Softly, softly, they rasp out words from their bodies, like insects at night.” The scene is mesmerizing, but it’s just a fantasy, an illusion conjured up in Natalie’s dying mind. In another, secondhand story, a helicopter pilot who gives tours of the Grand Canyon has a passenger jump out of the helicopter midflight. For months afterwards, the pilot is haunted by this event, until he gets a divorce and is “alone, except for the leaping man in his head.”

Fragmentary anecdotes like these provide the most jaw-dropping moments in the novel, and are so effective a reader may overlook the book’s narrative weakness. We Agreed to Meet compulsively operates in short-story mode, opting for compression, quick jabs, and mesmeric show-stoppers over continuity and scene-setting. The effect is a frantic kind of storytelling which, in the span of 164 pages, offers two narrative points of view, several time frames (we travel back 20 years to attend a kegger), about twenty characters (lascivious Indian radiologist, car-stealing insurance agent, washed-up Hollywood actor who pretends he’s Native American but is actually Mexican), and a slew of dysfunctional relationships (father-daughter incest, reunion with adult child given up for adoption, married man in love with teenaged girl, retired doctor and the ghost of Jim Jones, et. al.).

Reading such a dense novel can feel like being in the backseat of a car traveling nonstop through a safari, with a reader wanting to stop and poke around a bit, maybe get a little more explanation from the tour guide. Chapters are typically less than four pages long, the story is nonlinear, characters kind of whiz through, and most of the novel’s heavy lifting is done with chunks of summary instead of active scenes, dialogue, or description. Minor characters have a habit of dropping in to relay a magical anecdote before dematerializing back into the narrative ether, never to be heard from again. Long after you’ve closed the book, you’ll find yourself haunted by those random passages, like the leaping man from the helicopter who forever falls in the mind of the pilot. But for all the novel’s fleeting, almost ghostly quality, its crowded telling leaves a reader with ears ringing, wanting more.

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***

I will occasionally experience, upon waking from a good sleep, a momentary, acute disorientation. You may know what I’m talking about: Those first five seconds after a particularly vivid dream, just before the world comes into focus, when the laws of imagination and the laws of reality are blurred.

For me, this is a pleasing juxtaposition – an instant of magic during which the awareness of my own mental/corporeal disconnection provokes in me a state of quiet awe, the realization that even as my brain lingers in the dreamscape, my body attunes to the physical. Between these realms, there is space enough for a quiet truth to reveal itself: We humans, with our capacity for both complex thought and emotional attachment, are strange creatures indeed – far too irrational to be trusted.

This poses a sort of dilemma to the fiction writer: How do you aspire to veracity while maintaining a safe distance from the individual?

The answer for Steven Millhauser is to give reality the funhouse-mirror treatment: distorting the recognizable, exposing the hidden, and then presenting it all objectively. The thirteen beautifully crafted stories in his new collection, Dangerous Laughter, are not tales of love or sadness, of determination or redemption; they are not character-based introspections into the dark nature of man, or chronicles of steadfast struggle. They are presentations of alternate realities, wholly conceived other worlds at once familiar and foreign – where a worker from an unusual Historical Society ruminates on the value of his life’s labor and an adolescent feels the inevitability of summer’s end; where cities are sealed in domes and towers reach to the heavens.

The collection divides into three parts. The first, “Vanishing Acts,” considers the idea of discovery through withdrawal. In “The Room in the Attic,” a boy’s unorthodox relationship with his friend’s sister alters his perception of perception; in “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” a woman’s mundane life becomes the subject of intrigue after she mysteriously ceases to exist. The main character of the title story derives unbridled pleasure from a ritual steeped in taboo.

Part Two, “Impossible Architectures,” chronicles feats of daring engineering on scales both grand (the aforementioned dome and tower to Heaven, as well as the ambitious other town of “The Other Town”) and miniature (a model-maker’s painstaking construction of a world too small to be seen by the naked eye in “In the Reign of Harad IV”). The section titled “Heretical Histories” delves into an imagined past, where the Age of Concealment gives rise to a series of outlandish dresses (“A Change in Fashion”) and an artist of the Verisimilist school elicits curiosity and condemnation when he begins experimenting with animate paint (“A Precursor to Cinema”).

The enchantment of Dangerous Laughter is not merely a function of the tales themselves, but also of the way in which Millhauser tells them – with careful, attentive prose that is rich in detail yet never overwhelming. He accomplishes something truly admirable in these pages, capturing the sentiment of the intangible and giving it a form, allowing us glimpses into a wondrous world that is simultaneously plausible and implausible, real and make-believe, with no clear line to distinguish one from the other.

In the final story, “The Wizard of West Orange,” a librarian in Thomas Edison’s laboratory has a disturbing experience when he becomes the test subject for a machine that simulates the sense of touch. The haptograph, as the machine is called, has the ability to transmit both recognizable tactile sensations – a handshake, a pat on the back – and ones that are alien and indescribable. Thus, our narrator arrives at the following conclusion, which may be handily applied to Millhauser’s work as a whole: “[T]he world is hidden from us… our bodies, which seem to bring us the riches of the earth, prevent the world from reaching us. For the eyes of our skin are closed.”

And so I return to those blissful seconds at the beginning of my day, before the door to my unconscious has shut completely, when the physical and logical rules of the world do not yet apply, when I am neither holding onto what has passed nor waiting for the next thing to come. Because the real achievement of Dangerous Laughter is that no matter how outlandish, how distant from our reality these stories seem, there is always a kernel of truth that speaks to our humanity and reveals something profound about our world: that the potential for magic is ubiquitous, if only we open ourselves to its possibility.

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