Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, My first novel, published in 1995 and now available in a new paperback from Broadway and, like all six of my books, as a download for e-readers (I am fortunate and pleased to have all of my books in print and available for e-readers as well), is concerned with perceptions and reflections. It's about seeing yet not perceiving. The main character of the novel, Harriet Rose (who also makes an appearance in my third novel, The Little Women), didn't acknowledge the uncanny work of Diane Arbus, who was obsessed with twinning and mirroring and multiples, as she narrated her thoughts and feeling about her own photography. It would have been a good element to include in the story, and I regret not having devoted sufficient thought in that direction.

About photography, Diane Arbus said: "The process itself has a kind of exactitude, a kind of scrutiny that we're not normally subject to. I mean that we don't subject each other to. We're nicer to each other than the intervention of the camera is going to make us. It's a little bit cold, a little bit harsh."

The Music Lesson redux

This week, the new Broadway paperback of my second novel, The Music Lesson, was published. I am thrilled that my 1999 novel has steadily appealed to readers in more than a dozen languages and has been a perennial with book groups. The Picador paperback ran through eleven printings, and I am optimistic that the Broadway edition will have a nice long shelf life.

I am especially happy that Random House/Broadway are my new paperback publishers, with True Confections just out from Broadway, and with my first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, scheduled to appear later this year, in July. It is a major big deal for a novelist to have an entire backlist in print. It's a terrific vote of confidence from the publisher, and I am grateful.

Objects in Mirror

The forthcoming (July 2011) Broadway reissue of my first novel (which came out in 1995) is now listed at Amazon, complete with the wonderful new cover art. Much as I admire Henry Sene Yee, his finest work was not on the cover of the 1996 Picador paperback edition, which has always looked to me as if the book title is Appear Than They Are Closer in Mirror Objects.

At last, the book looks just right.

OBJECTS IN MIRROR

The title for my first novel probably helped attract a little bit of attention for the book, and even all these years later (it was published by Crown in 1995) people still light up and remark favorably about the title whenever it comes up.

The phrase originated as a safety warning required on the passenger side mirror of cars in the United States and Canada. I am not sure anyone knows who created the phrase with its distinctive missing "the." Side mirrors are convex, to provide an adequate field of view. So objects look smaller than they actually are, because they look farther away than they actually are. I love the phrase because the warning can also be taken to suggest that the past is not as far past as you think, but is in fact always present.

I am thrilled that Broadway will be bringing out a new paperback edition of Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear next summer, timed to match the release of my memoir, The Memory of All That. New cover image (for both!) soon.

Portrait of a Marriage

The Arnolfini Wedding is a central image of my first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, and it appeared on the jacket of the Crown hardcover in 1995. I still have a thing for that painting. There are many ways of reading this picture, and there are endless symbolic elements to decode, from the fruit on the sill to the candles in the light fixture. Among the various interpretations, the painting is thought to be a document, a record of the marriage depicted, with the painter, Van Eyck, appearing in the reflection as a witness.

My 34th wedding anniversary was on Sunday, and perhaps because of that, and also because I just saw the new cover image for the forthcoming Broadway Books paperback re-issue of Objects (Summer 2011), which is a fantastic design with a photograph and not this painting, I found myself wanting to look at the reflection detail particularly. Here it is.

What is a Photograph?

According to Diane Arbus, "A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know." How I wish I had put knowledge of this bit of wisdom into the head of Harriet Rose, the photographer and main character of my first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.

The Corner of Winter and Summer

The middle section of my first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, takes place in a New York suburban neighborhood very much inspired by my childhood surroundings, Forest Hills Gardens. The narrative in this section takes the form of a series of linked third person stories about Harriet in her childhood (in narrative strategy contrast to the epistolary first person of grown-up Harriet in Part One or the straightforward third person of Part Three that returns to the present of the Part One notebook of Harriet's letters).

As Harriet bicycles through those "Oxbridge Gardens" streets, it would have been just right for her to observe the uncanniness of a certain Forest Hills Gardens street corner a block from my childhood home: the intersection of Winter and Summer.

True Mirror

Harriet, the photographer obsessed with reflections (and the main character in Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear), would have been deeply fascinated by the True Mirror, which lets us "see ourselves as others see us."

Still Reflecting

Why didn't I mention the German photo-grapher Ilse Bing, the "Queen of the Leica"? Surely she would be Harriet Rose's role model in Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.

I love this Bing self-portrait, and have long thought it would be a great cover for a new edition of Objects. (Which is in the works, by the way.) Probably no marketing department would agree, however.

One More Reflection in the Mirror

My first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, is about a photographer obsessed with reflections.

Harriet Rose is young, and tends to be more observant than perceptive. The novel has as a kind of centerpiece the Jan Van Eyck wedding portrait of the Arnolfinis, which was on the very beautiful cover of the hardcover edition (Crown, 1995) and not on the un-good cover of the Picador paperback (Henry Sene Yee is brilliant and this is one of his only flops, ever, in my eyes.) Since publication, I have read a little more about self portraiture (and everything else), and it seems likely that artists chosing to depict themselves really began to flourish in the early Renaissance because of the advent of better and cheaper mirrors, many of them convex, like the mirror in the center of the Arnolfini portrait (which is slyly repeated on the beautiful spine of the Objects jacket, with the two little Arnolfini clasped hands). This is the kind of fact Harriet Rose would possess, or perhaps it is something her friend Anne Gordon would tell her. And there would be mention in this conversation of the Jan Van Eyck self portrait of 1433, which is considered by art historians to be one of the first mirror-influenced self-portraits.