"The Grand Complication" by Allen Kurzweil

The latest novel from the author of "A Case of Curiosities" follows an intrepid librarian and his sinister boss on the trail of Marie Antoinette's stolen watch.

By Laura Miller

Aug. 24, 2001 | For the work of a man named one of the best American novelists under 40 by Granta Magazine (in 1995), "The Grand Complication" is a peculiar book: So many of its claims on our interest lie outside the little fictional world a novel forms. For example, while this is a detective story in which the MacGuffin sought by several characters is an elaborate pocket watch commissioned for Marie Antoinette (but completed after her execution), the piquancy of that detail increases if you know that such a watch does in fact exist. And it was, like the watch in Kurzweil's novel, stolen from a museum in Jerusalem in the early 1980s and remains missing to this day.

Likewise, someone I know was persuaded to read "The Grand Complication" when he learned that, of the many mechanical devices described in the book, several have actually been built by the author and that he invented one of them himself: a roll-player, like those on player pianos, on which to read "books" printed on scrolls. (There's a patent pending notice on the copyright page for the gizmo.)

The novel's chief extra-textual connection, though, is its link to Kurzweil's celebrated 1992 bestseller "A Case of Curiosities." In the earlier book, a wooden case divided into 10 compartments, each but one filled with an enigmatic object, obliquely tells the life story of a fictional 18th century French artist and engineer who dreams of building a talking mannequin. "A Case of Curiosities" begins and ends with the narration of the unnamed contemporary collector who owns the case and has tracked down the tale behind each memento. That collector, now revealed to be one Henry James Jesson III, is a major character in "The Grand Complication." He persuades the narrator of this new novel -- Alexander Short, a librarian -- to join him in a quest to locate the missing item from the curiosity case: Marie Antoinette's watch.

Alexander accepts Jesson's offer of after-hours employment because both his job in the New York Public Library and his marriage to Nic, a French graphic artist specializing in pop-up books, have grown stale. The library is run by a martinet who can quote sections of the New York State Penal Code from memory and it's populated by an assortment of eccentrics who make for amusing minor fictional characters but trying colleagues. There's the fulminating leftist who oversees the Judaica department; the winking and nudging curator of the Center for Material Culture (an erotica collection); the persnickety Finster Dapples, guardian of the heraldry archives; and, worst of all, Irving Grote, head of Conservation, a man so protective of the library's volumes that he likes nothing better than to lock them up for months, safely out of reach of mere patrons, while they undergo endless "observation" and imperceptible "repairs."(Kurzweil had a fellowship at the NYPL's Center for Scholars and Writers.)

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