THE WATERMARK

A romp across genres encompasses a bookish mystery.

The portentously named Augustus Fate is “one of the most famous and celebrated authors alive today.” He’s also a world-class loon. Young Jaime Lancia is your standard underachiever, though not for want of trying: At the beginning of Mills’ novel, he’s filled out more than 540 job applications. Landing an interview with Fate may land Jaime a journalism gig, and so he heads to the Welsh countryside to find the great man, who meets him not in the resplendent cape of his author photos but “wearing a navy jumper with holes in it, a pair of brown corduroys and sandals, displaying a row of large, gnarled toes.” Fate is more interested in Jaime’s tale than his own, especially when it comes to Jaime’s yearning for Rachel Levy, so much so that Jaime winds up inventing tales about her to see what Fate will do with them: “The thought of him stealing my lies and weaving them into his prose, confident all the while that he was turning life into art, made me smile.” Well, abracadabra, Fate does him much better, stealing Jaime and Rachel away and locking them into a series of stories, one Dickensian, one a kind of pastiche Gogol, one set in London a generation or so after Jaime’s own day. “My novel is but a refuge from this world,” says one of several narrators, one of them Rachel, who at one point says, self-referentially, “We’re going to crash.…Funny how panic turns you into a narrator.” David Mitchell did much of this work, crash and all, with considerably more skill in Cloud Atlas, and not all of Mills’ rhetorical flourishes ring true. But her yarn has its moments, and it’s a passable entertainment.

A middling fantasy, with some nice touches for the metamagically-inclined bookworm.