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The Rest Is Done with Mirrors
The Rest is Done with Mirrors begins with a comic rape and ends—after much sexual swapping, wild parties, and sad betrayals—with two old friends (and lovers) staring at one another from opposite ends of a sofa, wondering what it all meant, anyway.
The Rest is Done with Mirrors is a novel about married graduate students at UCLA - how they live, breed, fornicate, study and how they are corrupted. It is more than that. It is one of the most stunningly blunt portraits of university life to appear in modern fiction; a trip through a maze of crumbling identities and substandard housing, tireless antagonisms and elusive government grants, half-forgotten dreams and half-satisfied passions.
Our guides through the maze are graduate students Edith Wong, the lower middle class WASP wife of Walter Wong, Chinese-American anthropologist; and Juan Ramirez, a Mexican-American biologist married to a painter. Their story is the story of a conspiracy between the university, the federal government and the great research-development organizations to absorb and use, for the purpose of Defense (death?), the talents and imaginations of our most gifted scientific graduate students.
The prime target of the conspiracy is Juan Ramirez, recruited by an organization called AXEL, and told to develop microbes that will destroy the enemy. What follows Juan's recruitment are superbly etched episodes telling of Juan's work as a spy for a black African country; his wife Lorraine's flagrant infidelities; Edith Wong's discovery of Walter fornicating with a strange girl on a gigantic bed of morning glories; and a great deal else, some of it very funny, much of it very true to life and true to the pain.
As the book closes, Edith and Juan are left to confront one another. The author writers that there were changes in their small lives, "but the general cast of characters remained the same. There are only two hundred people in the world ... the rest is done with mirrors."
The Rest is Done with Mirrors is a novel about married graduate students at UCLA - how they live, breed, fornicate, study and how they are corrupted. It is more than that. It is one of the most stunningly blunt portraits of university life to appear in modern fiction; a trip through a maze of crumbling identities and substandard housing, tireless antagonisms and elusive government grants, half-forgotten dreams and half-satisfied passions.
Our guides through the maze are graduate students Edith Wong, the lower middle class WASP wife of Walter Wong, Chinese-American anthropologist; and Juan Ramirez, a Mexican-American biologist married to a painter. Their story is the story of a conspiracy between the university, the federal government and the great research-development organizations to absorb and use, for the purpose of Defense (death?), the talents and imaginations of our most gifted scientific graduate students.
The prime target of the conspiracy is Juan Ramirez, recruited by an organization called AXEL, and told to develop microbes that will destroy the enemy. What follows Juan's recruitment are superbly etched episodes telling of Juan's work as a spy for a black African country; his wife Lorraine's flagrant infidelities; Edith Wong's discovery of Walter fornicating with a strange girl on a gigantic bed of morning glories; and a great deal else, some of it very funny, much of it very true to life and true to the pain.
As the book closes, Edith and Juan are left to confront one another. The author writers that there were changes in their small lives, "but the general cast of characters remained the same. There are only two hundred people in the world ... the rest is done with mirrors."
224 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
33 people want to read
About the author
Carolyn See
37 books76 followersCarolyn See was the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You and The Handyman.
She was the Friday-morning reviewer for The Washington Post, and she has been on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and PENWest International. She won both the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Getty Center fellowship. She lived in Pacific Palisades, California.
See also wrote books under the pen name Monica Highland, a name she shared with two others, her daughter Lisa See and her longtime companion, John Espey, who died in 2000.
See was known for writing novels set in Los Angeles and co-edited books that revolve around the city, including a book of short stories, LA Shorts, and the pictorial books Santa Monica Bay: Paradise by the Sea: A Pictorial History of Santa Monica, Venice, Marina Del Rey, Ocean Park, Pacific Palisades, Topanga & Malibu, and The California Pop-Up Book, which celebrates the city's unique architecture.
She was the Friday-morning reviewer for The Washington Post, and she has been on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and PENWest International. She won both the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Getty Center fellowship. She lived in Pacific Palisades, California.
See also wrote books under the pen name Monica Highland, a name she shared with two others, her daughter Lisa See and her longtime companion, John Espey, who died in 2000.
See was known for writing novels set in Los Angeles and co-edited books that revolve around the city, including a book of short stories, LA Shorts, and the pictorial books Santa Monica Bay: Paradise by the Sea: A Pictorial History of Santa Monica, Venice, Marina Del Rey, Ocean Park, Pacific Palisades, Topanga & Malibu, and The California Pop-Up Book, which celebrates the city's unique architecture.
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March 19, 2013
I am a HUGE Carolyn See fan. I think she is brilliant. Golden Days is an exceptional (and important) novel. As for "The Rest Is Done with Mirrors," I loved it even though I have no idea how to think about it/what I think about it. It was published in 1970, and I feel that it could never have been written today. See's kind of absurdity and satire would take on too much PC criticism (and I say this having read "Super Sad True Love Story" among other modern absurd satires). This book is also incredibly disturbing. It opens with a rape (not graphic) in which the victim marries her attacker. The backdrops of the novel are the graduate school/post-graduate school world at UCLA and a vague government office where recruited students work as spies for projects they don't even understand -- all one of the main characters knows is that his work will cause the deaths of innocent people in faraway countries. I think the best thing about this novel is its ability to reflect a mindset (futility, the individual's lack of power at the hands of "the man") during a specific time in American history. And the best thing about See's writing is her ability to make the craziest scenes (a very odd kidnapping, a death in the middle of a Chinese banquet) seem normal and even mundane.
Displaying 1 of 1 review