Product Description

With his debut novel, Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball emerged as one of our most extraordinary new writers. Now, Ball returns with this haunting tale of love and storytelling, hope and identity.

When Selah Morse sees a young woman get hit by a speeding taxicab, he rushes her to the hospital. The girl has lost her memory; she is delirious and has no identification, so Selah poses as her boyfriend. She is released into his care, but the doctor charges him to keep her awake, and to help her remember her past. Through the long night, he tells her stories, inventing and inventing, trying to get closer to what might be true, and hoping she will recognize herself in one of his tales. Offering up moments of pure insight and unexpected, exuberant humor, The Way Through Doors demonstrates Jesse Ball's great artistry and gift for and narrative.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #429119 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-10
• Released on: 2009-02-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307387462
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The search for a stranger's history leads down a narrative cul-de-sac in Plimpton Prize–winner Ball's accomplished and clever second novel (after Samedi the Deafness). When pamphleteer Selah Morse witnesses a taxi run down a young woman, he takes her to the hospital and, in telling the staff that he is her boyfriend and that her name is Mora Klein, is given custody of her. She is amnesiac, and his orders are to reconstruct her memories through story. The book then begins anew, and the narrative folds in upon itself again and again, launching in new directions and each time leaving the earlier story incomplete. Throughout, Morse searches out Mora Klein's identity, picking up other travelers along the way, among them a Coney Island mind reader; a doting husband who may or may not have made a deal with the devil; a love interest for Morse fascinated by the pamphleteer's opus; and a fiddle-playing dog. Though literal-minded readers may struggle to follow Morse's arc as the stories converge and he slips deeper into layers of story, Ball's skill with language and delight in comic absurdity make this an immensely enjoyable, brain-busting experience. (Feb.)
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From The New Yorker
In an inversion of the Scheherazade legend, the hero of this dizzyingly circuitous novel must tell stories all night to a beautiful amnesiac, to keep her awake and alive. He begins by explaining himself: he writes pamphlets (sample title: �An Inquiry into the Ultimate Utility of the Silly, as Prefigured in the Grave and Inhospitable�) and works as a municipal inspector, in an office reachable only by ladder. His stories dissolve, unfinished, into other stories; characters�including a �guess artist� who reads minds with a thirty-three-per-cent accuracy rate, a girl who accepts only written communications (preferably typed), and a spurned Russian empress who forces her former lover to marry �the ugliest of women��vanish and resurface; and reality is generally given the heave-ho. It�s a thrilling ride through an alternative New York (think Steven Millhauser on acid), where the tallest building extends hundreds of feet below ground and cabbies are paid in gold doubloons.
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics described The Way Through Doors as experimental fiction at its very finest. Loath to pigeonhole the novel, some nonetheless compared aspects of it to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Paul Auster's New York trilogy, and novels by Franz Kafka and Kazuo Ishiguro. Certainly, the work is disorienting as it plays with time, geography, and character -- from a Russian empress to princes to bureaucrats to a "guest artist" who reads minds. At times, the novel is perhaps too whimsical for mainstream tastes. But that reviewers were not bothered that they couldn't summarize the plot (and that they did not criticize the author's self-conscious construct) testifies to this novel's power. "Ball is a talented new writer whom we ought to watch," concludes the San Francisco Chronicle. "There is no other explanation."
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Customer Reviews

Mobius Strip Narrative
If you like fiction in which stories are nested within each other, tumbling and turning inside and out like a narrative mobius strip -- well, this is the book for you. But if you're someone who prefers realism, a classic three-act narrative arc, characters with depth, and all the trappings of "normal" fiction -- well, you're probably not going to like this.

The book's almost pointless framing device occurs when a young man in a New York-like metropolis of indefinite period sees a young woman knocked down by a taxi. He takes her to the hospital, where she lies in a coma, and the doctors tell the young man he must keep her mind occupied for 18 hours by talking to her. Thus, he starts spinning a tale, although it rather quickly becomes questionable as to whether he's telling stories, or stories are telling him.

It's all rather clever and tricksy in a McSweenysesque manner: the young man is a "pamphleteer" and the stories introduce the reader to all manner oddities, such as the tallest building in the city (which is actually subterranean and may actually be a foxes den), an inn with a fiddle-playing dog, a mind-reading companion of remarkable acuity, a girl who is born with the ability to draw a line straighter than any device known to man, the world's luckiest gambler, and so on. Just to give a taste, this is the kind of book where a man's job comes with authority that is "unlimited and nonexistent." If you find that kind of phrase compelling, you might well enjoy the book.

It's an interesting world, but one so topsy-turvey that you can't really try and make sense of it, you just need to let the writing wash over you. There are lots of nice turns of phrase, and the author clearly has style to burn. The question is whether or not it adds up to anything by the end. And with a book like this, there are sure to be a set of readers who find the experience magical, and another set who find it rather empty. I'm somewhere in the middle --I enjoyed some of the style, but it didn't end up sparking much of anything in me, despite its evident interest in themes of identity, passage, and vocation. But it's certainly worth trying if you like contemporary experimental fiction (for example, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves) or the work fabulists like Calvino or Borges.

Weaving threads into webs.
Jesse Ball's second novel with Vintage may confuse and frustrate some. I daresay this is of no import to Mr. Ball, though I could be mistaken. Indeed, there is a care for both the characters and the reader in this book, accompanied by an understanding that not all may find the book as engaging or enjoyable as others.

I'll spare you a recounting of events and names found within in favor of attempting to convey the experience of reading The Way Through Doors. As with his previous book, this one makes reality seem blurry. In fact, it is handily placed out of reach as if to say, "you need not be concerned with this, dear reader. Please join me for the experiences and playfulness I hope to share with you." In this sense reading any work by Ball requires a sort of trust and submission to the story. Obviously, only through the reader's agency to engage the text in the first place does the book take on life, but one's expectations should be checked upon opening the book; any preconceptions should be vanquished. Why such hyperbole? Because the thread of this book may not even end up being a thread! It may end up a web, and if the reader struggles or resists it may entrap and cause discomfort. If the reader relaxes into it, the web serves nicely as a hammock of sorts, though dozing off is strictly prohibited; one must pay full attention to the swirls of characters and events moving throughout the web. Some of these swirls are more brightly-colored than others, though any number of these will make an imprint on your psyche and linger as pleasant images in the mind's eye.

There is a playful nature to Ball's writing, though you may find it manifesting as glee in one example, and shortly after it may emerge very dire and obfuscated, like reveling in the macabre. Others have noted his work does not follow many conventions of the novel. There have been writers who discarded these conventions in disgust and furrowed their brows to create a sort of reaction to the novel. Not so Jesse Ball: in this regard he comes off as playing with the conventions, folding and re-folding them into forms--whether paper airplane, origami crane or something never before seen--which please him.

A complicatedly fantastic story
One day, a young man named Selah Morse, municipal inspector, witnesses a young woman get hit by a taxicab. He takes her to the hospital and tells the doctors that he is her boyfriend; the young woman has lost her memory and remembers nothing about herself, and Selah is charged with taking care of her and trying to help her regain her past. So, he tells her a story. Not just one story though, but a bunch--all wound together and interconnected. We hear about Loren Darius, a lucky gambler who has everything, until he bets away his wife for a skin of water. We hear about an empress of Russia, who is so burned when a man rejects her love that she takes every possible step to ruin his life utterly. We hear about Morris the tree climber and far walker, and his family at the bottom of the tallest building in the city, of which no one has ever known, due to its location in a very deep hole. We meet the guest artist who can tell you what you're thinking in three guesses or less. In between, we hear of Sif, girlfriend of the pamphleteer working on his lifelong project WF 7 J 1978. And, strung between all of these stories, we follow Selah's travels in search of the woman Mora Klein, the name he has given to the young woman who got hit by the taxicab.

If this all sounds a bit confusing, don't fret. /The Way Through Doors/ is Jesse Ball's second novel, at turns, perplexing, insightful, and uplifting, and sometimes all of the above at once. Throughout, it remains consistently engaging. These stories overlap and trail into each other seamlessly, often in the guise of dreams, stories within the story, or speeches. Characters are introduced, then later reappear--either in retellings of the original story or in a seemingly-unrelated story, tying plotlines together.

I'll admit that, more than once, I had to go back a few pages to determine when the story changed and why I hadn't fully noticed. It may have been hard to follow, but the exquisiteness of Ball's writing helps you let go of conventional writing and just go with the flow. I thoroughly enjoyed /The Way Through Doors/, and I know it won't be long before I'm drawn back to give this complex story another go.

Reviewed by Holly Scudero