The Illusionist by Dinitia Smith

Some of the ethicists (or moral philosophers) whom I admire most claim that being and doing good is more a matter of imagination than of deduction or analytic skills. Certainly, a kind of stubborn obtuseness, an inability or refusal to put oneself in the circumstances of another, is responsible for a lot of the immorality in the world.

In her powerful, short novel The Illusionist, Dinitia Smith describes in chilling detail what can happen to people simply because they are different and can be seen as Other—difference of color, of sex, of economic class, of ethnicity. Dean Lily, the lead character in Smith’s novel, is not only different; he also dares to conceal the difference. Suppose you were to awaken one morning to discover that you were somehow in the wrong body, and that those around you seem not to notice. Dean finds himself in just that condition every morning, a boy, a young man, who has always known himself to be a boy, but who happens to have the genitals of a girl, and who (much to his embarrassment) begins to sprout breasts in his teens. From the first, he understands and tries his best to get others to understand that there has simply been a mistake, a confusion. And as soon as he is able, he wanders away from his small, upstate New York town in order to be the person he feels himself to be.

Ah, but if being different is a sin in the eyes of the many, the they-self, how much worse to be different and to pretend to ascend to the throne of power, to pretend to be a man. Mere difference is one thing, and bad enough, but pretending to be one of the chosen, one of the elect, that cannot be forgiven.

Dean not only looks and acts like a gentle, attractive male, he also does magic tricks, and attracts attention with his smooth sleights of hand. Even the jaded, usually bored patrons of the local bar in Sparta, The Wooden Nickel, stop watching the football on TV, interrupt their desultory half-conversations with their neighbors to watch as the new guy in town performs feats of magic. If the men are as suspicious as they are interested, the women are simply interested. Chrissie loves Dean simply because he attends to her, notices her, with no sexual overtones at all. He moves in with her and immediately shares in household chores, and not on command, but simply seeing what needs to be done. Terry, older and tougher than Chrissie, already abandoned by one man and now raising an infant boy on her own, falls for Dean because of the attention he pays to her body, because he seems to be able to make love to all of her, and demands nothing in return. And if his careful attention to her and her needs were not enough, he also really attends to her son, plays with him, cares for him.

While Dean is not voracious, while he does not behave as most of the myopic men in town , counting each sexual encounter as a conquest, nevertheless, he does seem to need to have women fall for him. Melanie, the pretty and much sought after girl who already (at about the age of twenty) lives in reclusion with her mother, usually on the run from what she sees as the misguided interests of the men around her, falls for Dean because he does not have to touch her. Indeed, he refuses to touch her, worshipping her at arm’s length, loving her with a pure love that does not burn.

Smith gives us the story of each of these women, changing voices as she moves from character to character, and (in my estimation) makes each love believable. The reader can understand quite well just why each of these women finds Dean so attractive. And while there seems to be a kind of cruelty in Dean in his moving from woman to woman, from love to love, he seems not simply to be using them. When Melanie confronts him about his relationship with Terry, Dean does not deny his love for Terry; it is simply different from the love he has for Melanie. And he comes across with the same sort of innocence in a confrontation with Terry, neither denying Melanie nor seeing his love for Terry as inconsistent with other loves. If Dean is driven, it is not a drive for conquest, for collecting notches; rather, it is a drive to be a man, to be seen as a man. If women love him, then he must be a real man.

While the love stories in this little book are each convincing and somehow affirming, the reactions of the men are both ugly and predictable. Bad enough that this stranger shows up on the scene wooing with his acts of illusion, now the women are falling for him, and the men sniff a difference. This man does not fight when insulted; he hangs out with women instead of men. An outsider who is after their women, but worse than that, he is an illusionist who dares to pretend, who dares to ascendancy. Of course, he must be brought down, must be exposed in front of the women. And exposing is not enough; he must be raped, violated, beaten. Certain that when he is seen for what he is, exposed for what he is not, the women will come back to the real men.

I have to admit that as I was reading this book, the writing was so beautiful, the little love relationships so convincing and pretty, that I hoped for a happy ending. I would have preferred happiness to truth, though I could not shake a sense of foreboding. At least in this culture, difference is not rewarded, and the less power men have, the more jealous they are of that scant power. Dean is doomed from the beginning. Although he knows himself to be Dean Lilly, the men will allow him to be only Lilly Dean. He must be made to pay for his arrogant attempt to ascend.

I have some small reservations about this book; I was bothered by it, made anxious by it. But I think most of the anxiety has to do with the world I find myself in rather than with the story Smith has to tell us. Somehow, I wanted the author to tell us more, to make us understand more thoroughly. Who was this man? What did he need? What did he want? What are we to learn from his life? Quoting from the text:

So what did people know about Dean? Did they guess? One moment, you were looking at a boy. The next, you shifted the angle of your sight just a little and—and lo and behold—he was a girl! And you were left squinting and wondering. But maybe people just didn’t want to know the actual truth. It was more fun that way anyhow. Dean was like going to the movies. He was entertainment. Watching him was something to do, he was someone to look at and smile about if you saw him on the street, or at night when you were drinking at the Wooden Nickel. If you were an old person, and sitting there in the window of your house day after day looking out onto the street, you’d see Dean strutting down the sidewalk, handsome and cocky, in his cowboy hat and boots with their thick heels. He’d catch you staring at him and he’d grin and he wouldn’t let go of your eyes, he’d force you to look at him, and you’d just keep staring and staring in spite of yourself.

But is there an actual truth? Certainly the actual truth cannot be that he was really a girl; he would know that better than we, wouldn’t he? Instead, I think he was right; there had been a mistake, a confusion, and only he understood the actual truth.

Schlink, Smith, and Berg

I want to do something a little different today. I want to tell you very briefly about three different books—all short, and all well worth reading.

The first is a very current novel by a German author, Bernhard Schlink; the name of the novel is The Reader. Easily readable in a day, this little novel begins innocently enough with the story of a young German boy who is ill with hepatitis. Out of school for awhile but, under the direction of his doctor, told to take daily walks to regain his strength, this young man meets a woman who is more than twice his age who becomes his lover. It would be hard to say who seduces whom, but I found this part of the novel quite touching. The affection between the two seems obvious enough, and although the young man begins to feel some shame about having such an ‘old woman’ as his lover, the relationship between the two is both believable and somehow (to this reader at least) heartwarming.

However, after this more or less happy beginning, the woman disappears quite suddenly, the boy thinking that he has perhaps driven her away as he begins to feel ashamed of her when he is well enough to rejoin his school friends. Many years later, when he is involved in studies for his law degree, he encounters her again under surprising and exceptional circumstances. Along with several other women, his old lover reappears as a defendant in a war-crimes trial, accused not only of having been a guard at one of the concentration camps, but also of being complicit (either by neglect or otherwise) in the deaths of many women prisoners.

The moral dilemmas raised as this trial unwinds are gutwrenching, and not only the moral dilemmas of deciding on the culpability for the deaths of the women prisoners. I won’t say more than this here, because the unwinding of the plot is, in many ways, presented as a mystery. Schlink, himself a judge in Germany, has published mystery novels before this one. Here, he shows himself to be not merely an excellent writer, but also a person very able to handle complicated moral questions. This book was recently highlighted on Oprah’s book club, and should warn those of us who are too quick in rejecting her selections.

The second novel is one that has been out for over a decade and which my students had recommended to me on several different occasions. The author is Lee Smith, and the title is Family Linen. This novel is about the history of a family in a small southern town. A woman, Sybill, who is plagued with headaches that induce long periods of sleeplessness agrees finally to go to a hypnotist after her regular doctor despairs of curing her and suggests that she see a psychiatrist. Her friend, knowing that she does not want to see a psychiatrist, suggests a hypnotist instead.

... she didn’t want to go, both knew, to a psychiatrist. Sybill regarded her unconscious like she regarded the reproductive system, as a messy, murky darkness full of unexplained fluids and longings which she preferred not to know too much about. Except perhaps it was true, as Dr. Rowland apparently believed, that something down in there was out of whack....

And so begins what is a clever and often funny story that is also often profound. Like some of the best of women’s journal novels, this book shows how diving into the dirty linen of a family reveals a lot about the relations between men and women and between parents and children. Using the device of the hypnotist, Smith allows the reader to see the past not only of Sybill, but of her siblings and her parents as well. Though suspicious of the hypnotist at first, she decides that,

All in all he is one of the nicest little men she has ever talked to, a big relief. Usually Sybill doesn’t talk to men at all, or at least not about anything very personal. But Bob [the hypnotist], she can tell, is really interested, as interested as Betty or any one of her women friends. Plus he’s not exactly a man, either, being a hypnotist.

Like the first novel, this one, too, is a bit of a mystery as the past and the plot unfold. And while the humor and the writing make it race along, this little book is one of substance with a lot to tell us about relationships.

Finally, I want to mention another little book by Elizabeth Berg entitled The Pull of the Moon. This book is about a woman who runs away from home, knowing, as so many women seem to discover, that they will never find themselves if they stay in the relationship they are in. The novel is really a series of letters that this woman writes to her husband as she travels around the country in search of herself.

From the beginning, this run-away is astounded by the intimacy that she achieves with other women along the way. None seem very surprised that this adult woman, all of whose children are grown and gone, has run away from home, nor do they argue with her to return. At one point in an early encounter, the woman encounters another who confesses that she, too, runs away from her husband with regularity (though she rarely goes far or for long).

I thought, how can it be that two strangers are exchanging such intimate things? Well, most women are full to the brim, that’s all. That’s what I think. I think we are most of us ready to explode....

And so the reader is treated with just what these women are full to the brim with. It is rich with these conversations between women—conversations about their men, about raising children, about growing old, about life seeming to pass them by. Though not sure at first why she has left, thinking even that her leaving is a kind of suicide, soon she realizes that she is on her own existential quest.

It feels like this is a time for coming into my own. Extraordinary to suddenly think of this as a time for gain. Martin used to say, imitating his funny old grandmother, ‘Oy, I can’t vait to get home and take my goidle off.’ Well, my girdle’s off. Flung into the wind. What a luxury, the feel of one’s true flesh beneath one’s own hand.

My prediction is that with each of these novels you will simply breeze along, having a good time, feeling entertained. And it will only be after you have finished, pausing for a few moments to think about what you have read, that you will realize that you have learned quite a lot along the way.