Book Review: Readings

The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

by Dominic Smith

Atria Books, 306 pp., $24

In his debut novel, Dominic Smith describes Daguerre spending a year using a camera obscura to paint an exact replica of the view from his terrace. Daguerre was first a set designer whose hyperrealist, life-sized paintings won him fame; it was his desire to capture a scene in precise detail that lead to the development of the daguerreotype, an early photographic form.

Smith writes with the fastidiousness of a miniaturist, and even the smallest details are intricately painted. There is a clear affinity between the author and his subject, a common perfectionism and keen observational eye. Smith writes that Daguerre sees "life gathering in small gestures and moments," and this can also describe Smith's narrative style. Daguerre is obsessed with color – he carries lapis lazuli in his pocket – and even as a lowly, apprenticed palette mixer, he's capable of reproducing nature's colors with startling exactitude. Smith seems to delight in finding the perfect word as much as Daguerre delighted in finding the right color, and he does so often. He has a gift for description; his love of language is plain, and each page promises uncommon and beautiful words: little-used names of plants and birds and hues. It is a true pleasure to read an author who understands the inherent poetry of natural names and uses them with such obvious relish.

Still, despite the book's strength, it is not without its flaws. In some instances, perhaps straining for a period sound, Smith's narration has an overwritten, formal tone that approaches laughable verboseness. The phrase "he circumnavigated the venue" is one example of several where Smith seems to be suffering from Roget's-itis. The book's narrative structure stems from Daguerre's mission to photograph 10 things (the sun, "a perfect apple," etc.) before the apocalypse, an event heralded by his mercury-fueled hallucinations. It's a brilliant organizing principle, but the last item on the list is Daguerre's lost love, Isobel, and the convolutions that lead him to her – through a bohemian prostitute named Pigeon – are contrived in a disappointingly predictable manner. These problems are more than made up for by the book's exceptional language, but hopefully Smith won't need to compensate for anything in his next effort.

Dominic Smith will be at BookPeople on Thursday, March 16, 7pm