A Devil's Bargain

Henry can make his beloved sister disappear -- but can he get her back?

MR. SEBASTIAN AND THE NEGRO MAGICIAN

By Daniel Wallace

Doubleday. 257 pp. $21.95

The Devil in Daniel Wallace's engaging if sometimes elusive new novel, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, frequents upscale summer resort hotels, lives in Muncie, Ind., knows a fair number of card tricks and is very, very white.

The Depression is raging when Henry Walker, the story's hero, first meets the Devil, a.k.a. Mr. Sebastian, in room 702 of the Fremont Hotel. Henry is 10 -- his mother is dead, his handyman father is a hapless alcoholic, and he has just lost his younger sister Hannah's affections to a stray dog named Joan Crawford. Dejected, he enters the room to find a man "sheet white, cloud white," moving a coin between his fingers and mysteriously disappearing and reappearing. Mr. Sebastian offers to teach Henry the secret of magic, beginning with sleights such as the Montana Hideaway and the Carpathian Struggle, but soon moving to real magic, unexplained, dangerous magic of the sort that requires the swearing of a blood oath: "I swear never to reveal the source of my magic or . . . perform any illusion to a nonmagician without first practicing the effect until the illusion is perfect; otherwise I will lose all that I have gained. I swear not only to practice illusion, but to live within it, to seem but not to be, for only in this way can we fully partake in the magical world."

Henry promises, and a few weeks later during an impromptu magic show again in Room 702, makes Hannah disappear. The problem is, despite all he tries, he can't get her to come back.

Hannah's disappearance and Henry's life-long search for her become the subject of a peripatetic narrative told by members of Jeremiah Mosgrove's Chinese Circus, where Henry Walker washes up in the 1950s. We learn that after Hannah's disappearance Henry took up with the Barnum-esque Tom Hailey, who convinced him to take melanin pills and sit in front of a light box to make himself appear black. After all, Hailey says, "There's a glut of Caucasian prestidigitation right now." Now known as Bakari (Swahili for One Who Will Succeed), Henry becomes a celebrity as a Negro magician until Hailey dies, the pills run out, and he is white again. After a fantastic stint in World War II in which Henry's magic is improbably credited with a crucial mission, and one extraordinary performance during which, appearing under his own name, he brings his dead assistant and lover back to life only to lose her again, he re-applies black face and goes out into the world performing as two men: one skilled and white, one bumbling and black. In this schizophrenic state, Henry tracks down and does battle with Mr. Sebastian, but can anyone really beat the Devil?

If it all seems dreamy and unbelievable, it's supposed to. Wallace's structure is its own parlor trick. Did Henry really make Hannah disappear? Was she abducted? Was she given up by her father, and is she now living a respectable life with Mr. Sebastian? The revolving narration makes each fragment of Henry's story true for the one who tells it, yet when truth itself remains a perpetual illusion, a book can teeter on the verge of sophistry. All becomes suggestion and misdirection, never allowing exploration of the larger themes of race and the evils of hypocritical respectability at which it hints. Instead of giving us so many characters freighted with mystery and seeming meaning, such as Jenny the Ossified Girl, Wallace might have let himself go deeper into the description that Jeremiah Mosgrove, the circus proprietor, gives of Henry as "an American of the highest order: a self-made freak."

The questions remain: Why are Negro magicians so rare? What is the cost of changing skins? Why does the Devil make pacts with the most mundane people? Without answers, we are left with a shadowy Henry whose personality and sense of purpose too easily vanish in a puff of smoke. But maybe that, too, is the point. Mr. Sebastian tells Henry that to make real magic "you have to find an audience who think they understand what's happening. . . . You will seek to present an effect so clever and skillful that the audience won't believe their eyes, and can't think of the explanation, but feel in their hearts there is one. But there won't be; even you won't be able to explain it. The sense of universal bafflement is part of the entertainment."

If Mr. Sebastian is to be believed, there is certainly magic here. ·

Sheri Holman is the author of four novels including "The Dress Lodger" and "The Mammoth Cheese."