The Man in the Automaton

By Paul Gray

KINGKILL

by THOMAS GAVIN

398 pages. Random House. $10.

In 1826 a German flimflam man named Johann Nepomuk Maelzel appeared in the U.S. and began wowing the natives with his traveling show of mechanical marvels. His treasures included an automated trumpet player, a device called the panharmonicon that could duplicate the sound of a 40-piece orchestra (playing Beethoven) and an elaborate diorama showing the burning of Moscow. But Maelzel's star attraction was a hoax: a chess automaton nicknamed the Turk that took on all comers--and was every bit as talented as the human player cleverly concealed within it. That role was filled by William Schlumberger, an Alsatian hunchback who, until hitching up with Maelzel, was the second best chess player at the Cafe de la Regence in Paris. The machine might have conned its way across the country save for a brilliant detective named Edgar Allan Poe, who exposed the secret in 1836. Maelzel and Schlumberger both died two years later.

So much is history. First Novelist Thomas Gavin, 36, reopens this long-closed case with a single question: What if Schlumberger did not die when the newspapers claimed but lived on in obscurity, composing a private journal of his bizarre life? If such a document existed, it might tell something worth hearing about a chess genius who mysteriously elected to spend twelve years playing inferior opponents while anonymously stuffed in an airless, sweltering box. Gavin asserts that such a document did exist and that Kingkill is based on it. With this single shading of fact into fiction, the performance begins.

Special Effects. A literary stunt?

Yes, and well worth the price of admission. Beethoven and Napoleon materialize, as do Concord coaches, corduroy roads and a fully outfitted Mississippi River steamboat. With a few judicious details as props, Gavin creates palpable illusions of scenes 150 years old. Schlumberger and a companion stalk the New York waterfront at night: "Now and then they entered the nimbus of a gas lamp hovering just over their heads like a phosphorescing sea creature. Schlumberger heard the sinister hiss behind the glass. One pace beyond the lamp his shadow was squeezing from under his heel squat as a dwarf, and four strides later it was a lanky giant being sucked headfirst into the dark."

But Kingkill has more on its mind than special effects. The two main characters, Schlumberger and Maelzel, lock themselves in a struggle as tense and potentially humiliating as a championship chess match. Maelzel tempts the malformed Schlumberger into his machinery by using Louise Rouault, the wife of a mechanic-assistant, as bait. Eventually, Louise disappears but Schlumberger remains. The Turk frees him from the fear of losing a match publicly and gives him the power to expose Maelzel at any time. For his part, Maelzel exploits Schlumberger's gift for his own profit and dreams of a truly automated player. Mountebank that he is, Maelzel desperately wishes that the Turk could be a total machine, one that he could control completely.

Careful Planning. The ripples of this struggle extend well beyond the period covered by Gavin's story. Yet the author, who teaches English at Middlebury College in Vermont, never draws arrows pointing toward buried meanings or underscores the ironies that hover whenever the present looks at the past. The world of Schlumberger, Maelzel and 19th century America seems to appear and spin spontaneously, a sure sign in art that careful planning was at work from the beginning.

Aspiring authors are regularly instructed to write about what they know. Many of them, unfortunately, know the same things. That is why first novels tend to cluster around a few subjects: growing up absurd, free sex and expensive therapy, anomie in graduate school and the difficulties of writing a first novel. Kingkill is a refreshing and welcome break with this tradition. Gavin writes not only about what he knows but about what he has learned. Meticulously researched and written over a 5 1/2-year period, his novel shows how much vibrancy can be taken out of libraries if imagination and talent enter them. Gavin has built a construction just as in genious and mysterious as the Turk, and it too pulses with inner life.

Paul Gray

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