Review | A New York state of writing: Vanity Fair writer Keziah Weir’s ‘enthralling’ new novel ‘The Mythmakers’

“The Mythmakers,” the enthralling debut novel from Keziah Weir, who was raised on Salt Spring Island and is now a senior editor at Vanity Fair, begins with a literary encounter.

Salale Cannon, in her late 20s and struggling to make a living in magazines in New York, is looking for “a truly worthwhile idea” to write about when she reads a short story in the Paris Review. Written by Martin Scott Keller, something of a cult figure, whose major literary success came in the early 1970s, the story follows “a married writer who meets a colleague’s teenage daughter at a literary salon, hosted by said colleague, and becomes infatuated. He goes home and gets in bed next to his wife … the man begins fantasizing about the girl’s life without him in it. He will think of her forever, and she will not think of him at all.”

While the story is new to her, Salale (who goes by Sal), recognizes the situation: it happened to her, six years earlier, when she met Keller at a literary event at the New York Public Library. “He’d lifted certain details straight from reality,” Weir writes. “Here was the amused way he’d watched me, as though he knew me. He’d plucked the silver rose barrette quite literally from my own hair.”

Sal believes she has the subject for her next piece, only to learn, upon reading the story’s introduction, that Keller died earlier the same year; the story was published posthumously.

That, however, doesn’t stop her: in the wake of a drunken night out she barely remembers, which resulted in her boyfriend leaving for a couple of weeks to clear his head, Sal boards a bus for a small town in upstate New York and makes contact with Keller’s widow, Moira, a theoretical physicist. Over the summer, her life will interweave with Keller’s legacy, the life of his widow and the mysterious unfinished novel, of which the short story was actually the opening chapter.

On the surface, “The Mythmakers” is concerned with issues of authority and authorship, about the ownership of stories and the rights of their telling (it even, handily, name-checks Meg Wolitzer’s “The Wife” partway through), and it succeeds admirably at this level. There is, however, more to it than that.

In its own way, the novel is a mystery (one which it largely leaves the reader to solve), rooted thematically in Moira’s work in theoretical physics. Acute readers will begin to notice that things don’t quite add up, that dates and historical information seem somewhat hazy and unfixed, no matter how authoritatively they are handled. At one point, for example, Martin (in the early 1970s) worries that Martin Amis is going to beat him to the punch with his new novel. Except Martin Amis didn’t publish his first novel, “The Rachel Papers,” until 1973. It initially reads like an error, the sort of thing pedantic readers (i.e., me) will find alienating, but it is instead an example of slippage: who remembers the past? Who is telling this story? Who knows the truth?

“The Mythmakers” is a smart, compelling novel, one which seems to change shape the further one reads, which serves to question the very act — and beliefs — of reading and writing.

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