From the dustjacket:
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."
