Within the first few pages of Jesse Ball's second novel, The Way Through Doors, it's abundantly clear that the book exists in a world not quite our own. While ostensibly set in New York City, the metropolis is treated as a slippery dreamworld, where the Brooklyn dead-letter office is piled two stories high with envelopes and the tallest building is not the Empire State Building, but a secret one that extends deep underground.
As the story begins, a young man named Selah Morse begins work as a municipal inspector in the Seventh Ministry at his powerful uncle's behest. The nature of his work is unknown even to him, but he's given a well-tailored suit (in the manner of those worn by the Albanian secret police, as one character notes) lined with secret pockets, some containing strange letters addressed to him. His office is a strange, Kafkaesque place, accessible only by ladder. During his first day on the job, his message-girl, cat-like Rita, almost poisons him before deciding against it on a whim.
Selah soon settles into his routine, though what exactly his work consists of remains unclear. The story begins to take shape when, one afternoon, Selah witnesses a beautiful stranger run down by a taxicab, striking her head (and only her head). For unexplained reasons, he accompanies the girl to the hospital and pretends to be her boyfriend. He's told that the girl has lost her memories, and that he should create a book about her life so she may remember them again. Most importantly, though she may be discharged, she absolutely cannot fall asleep. Selah christens the girl Mora Klein and decides to keep her awake by telling stories throughout the night.
These stories form the major body of The Way Through Doors. In a structure reminiscent of Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, Ball begins to follow threads of narrative only to drop them and move onto something else entirely, opening up stories within stories like nesting dolls. The Way Through Doors is an inventive and strange little book, toying with the possibilities of narrative while giving us tantalizingly incomplete glimpses at dozens of possible fictions. But even when it appears that the book is ready to disappear into itself, Ball manages to reign in his story, making sure everything, even the loose threads, fit together with a certain sort of internal logic. The Way Through Doors is about good storytelling, and it would be a dismal failure if Ball were not a good enough storyteller to keep up with his subject. Luckily for us, he's more than capable.
Ball's previous work — particularly Vera & Linus, a collection produced in collaboration with his wife Thórdís Björnsdóttir — owes a heavy debt to fairy and folk tales, and this book is no different. At times certain characters and scenarios may veer dangerously towards the twee and much of the dialogue is far from realistic, but if one keeps the author's influences in mind, the book plays out more convincingly (or more acceptably unconvincingly).
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