Book Review: Mr. Sebastian & the Negro Magician

MR. SEBASTIAN AND THE NEGR0 MAGICIAN. By Daniel Wallace. Published by Doubleday. 260 pages. $21.95.

Mr. Sebastian has a similar style to Daniel Wallace’s earlier books, Big Fish, The Watermelon King and Ray in Reverse, but it’s less satisfying. It lacks the element that kept those previous yarns from unraveling; the sense that there’s a whole universe of fanciful stories out there just hinted at by the NC author.

That’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of fancy in this book. There are plenty of stories, too, as the life of Henry Wells (the Negro Magician) is documented or mythologized by a vivid parade of characters.

Wells has fallen on hard times and he’s lost his magic touch. Where once he was able to conjure gold dust and doves from thin, he now has trouble with the simplest card tricks. As we learn through the split narratives, Wells has lived a doomed life, crushed by the Great Depression, soldiering through World War II and living by his wits as a street scoundrel in the intervening years.

Mr. Sebastian has mesmerizing moments but it ultimately seems slim – as if something has vanished from the text. In his urge to write what he describes as his first fully-formed novel, Wallace has dumped his usual, loose anything’s-possible writing voice. This novel would be adequate if the rest of the writer’s oeuvre wasn’t such a hard act to follow.