Reviewed by Alan Furst The New York Times
In the early 1970s, word got around the expatriate community in Paris that Harry Mathews "was CIA." Why? Well, as he writes in his new autobiographical novel, he was thought to be very rich, and gay; he had an Ivy League, WASP sort of background; he had visited Laos, and he had time to do whatever he liked, including writing well-regarded novels. Case closed.
The book he has now written about this period in his life, "My Life in CIA" - a knowing acquaintance in the book points out that insiders never use the article "the"; it's not the CIA, simply CIA - begins as a memoir; recollective, argumentative and amusing. The "Harry Mathews" character makes it clear that he isn't gay, though he often dines with a gay friend, nor is he very rich, though he has a small inheritance that, combined with his novelist's ingenuity, allows him to live well. And he's not CIA.
But the rumor persists and begins to irritate him. So a friend comes up with a splendidly bad idea: if saying you're not in the CIA means you are, cross to the other side of the hall of mirrors and say you are - now disbelief is leverage in your favor, right? His narrator then proceeds to act in what he imagines to be a CIA-like manner; he delivers a mysterious box (cigars) to a headwaiter, makes pink chalk marks on walls, though no dead drops follow, and sets up what he means to look like a proprietary - a company owned by an intelligence service, designed as a cover for clandestine work. That does it. Elements of the secret world - the French intelligence service, the Mossad and the CIA itself - now come sliding out of the night.
At this point, the book begins to feel more like a novel, though strains of memoir are woven through it: references to foreign friends, expatriates from everywhere, their sexy, foreign names tossed about as though of course everyone knows them; perfect little restaurants and what to order; a flickering on-and-off (mostly off) love life; visits to the ballet, the opera, the country house; rainy epiphanies and discussions about the politics of culture. Those discussions center on Mathews's real-life membership as the sole American in the Oulipo, the Workshop for Potential Literature, a Gallic mind-game movement.
But "My Life in CIA" isn't an Oulipian novel; in fact it works hard at arranging the conventional furniture of generic spy fiction - the abduction rolled up in a carpet, the scary interview with thuggish or omniscient KGB types, the murderous agendas of right-wing lunatics. Now and then, however, a bit of spycraft floats by that seems as though it might be the real thing. For example, the tactics of a man named "Patrick" who shows up from nowhere and cleverly draws Mathews into a very forthcoming conversation. Such authenticities could well be taken from expatriate mythology, which tries to identify the occasional real spies who float through the expatriate community.
Still, no matter the rough edges of its spy-novel mechanics, "My Life in CIA" is extremely appealing. For people living abroad, life is commonly a separate country - Expatriatia - populated by citizens of the world. And American expats in the Paris of the early 1970s lived rather similar lives: trying to answer the questions of extremely puzzled Parisians. What is Watergate? Why is it important? And hunting down cranberry sauce a week before Thanksgiving. This existence is so basic to Mathews that his point of view is alive in every paragraph.
Still, you write a novel at your peril. You believe, at the beginning, that you own it, but then it turns out to own you. There is some pleasure to be had in watching this play out in "My Life in CIA," because the biochemistry that kicks in two-thirds of the way through a novel will not be denied. Mathews sets in motion all these plots and subplots, and he has created all these characters. Thus the book turns into a real spy novel, with elaborate ruses and strategies designed to extract the narrator from the tangled difficulties heaped on him in the novel's early pages.
Mathews does this rather well. He must escape and travel secretly, and his spy-novel allies pitch in to help him out. So what you have at the end of the day is a book that's easy to like, an unusual pleasure: an American expatriate spy fantasy, and a very entertaining novel. Of course it is a novel. Right?
Alan Furst is the author of eight historical espionage novels. His most recent is "Dark Voyage."
In the early 1970s, word got around the expatriate community in Paris that Harry Mathews "was CIA." Why? Well, as he writes in his new autobiographical novel, he was thought to be very rich, and gay; he had an Ivy League, WASP sort of background; he had visited Laos, and he had time to do whatever he liked, including writing well-regarded novels. Case closed
