Dominic Smith

Some Reviews for The Beautiful Miscellaneous

Booklist (starred review), April 1, 2007

At 17, Nathan Nelson has no idea what he wants to be. His particle-physicist father, however, has already made up his mind: Nathan will be a genius! The boy, who considers himself only slightly above average, has his doubts. “Being less than brilliant with a genius parent,” he notes, “is like being the bum who stares, midwinter, through the restaurant window.” But things change dramatically when—as the result of an accident—Nathan develops synesthesia; he begins seeing, tasting, and feeling words. He also develops an encyclopedic memory. Filled with new hope, Nathan’s father enrolls his son in the Brook-Mills Institute for Talent Development, a research facility that Nathan’s blind pianist roommate calls the “Taj Mahal of weird.” When his father develops a brain tumor, Nathan’s struggles to satisfy the man’s great expectations before it’s too late become increasingly poignant. This unusual, gorgeously written novel is filled with pleasures: among them are richly imagined supporting characters, including Whit, the astronaut and improbable best friend of Nathan’s father, and Teresa, the medical psychic with whom the boy falls in love. Best of all, though, is the book’s invitation to wonder—about the imponderables of life and death, the nature of intelligence, and the ultimately inexplicable relationships of fathers and sons. —Michael Cart


Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2007

He's no genius, but he's hardly normal; a boy struggles with this quandary in this finely modulated second novel (The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, 2006).

Nathan Nelson is an only child burdened by expectations of genius. The problem is not his high-minded but practical mother; it's his father Samuel, a college physics professor in their Wisconsin town. Samuel has large ambitions of his own (he is looking for the ghost particle), but he takes Nathan's mild precocity for genius. He subjects him to frequent math and science drills. For his tenth birthday in 1980, Samuel plans a surprise trip to California. Disneyland, hopes Nathan, but no such luck; they visit Samuel's shrine, the Stanford Linear Accelerator. The fact is Samuel, while trying to do the best by his son, is clueless about kids and has no people skills. A crisis erupts at the seventh-grade science fair when Nathan, seeing the rest of his childhood gobbled up by similarly dreary events, deliberately flubs the championship question and gains a respite. This is where an interesting novel becomes even more so. Nathan's grandfather, drunk, causes a deadly highway accident. The old man dies; after a brief near-death experience, Nathan emerges from a coma to find he has synesthesia—some sensory boundaries have dissolved; words have colors and tastes; he can perform astonishing feats of memory; his father's hopes of genius surge back. Nathan attends an Institute for the unusually gifted, but again he disappoints his dad, who will soon learn he has an inoperable brain tumor. There are moving scenes before and after his death as Nathan realizes that behind his difficult exterior, Samuel did harbor unconditional love for him. There are also plenty of lighter moments, and the unerringly true dialogue is a delight; one dinner-table conversation of a "normal" family, eavesdropped on by Nathan, deserves to be anthologized.

A luminous addition to novels about fathers and sons.

Texas Monthly, June, 2007

If genius truly skips a generation, what becomes of the moderately stellar offspring of brilliant parents? In his wry and affecting THE BEAUTIFUL MISCELLANEOUS, Austinite DOMINIC SMITH probes the fate of Nathan Nelson, who must suffer his quark-physicist father's efforts--whiz kid camps, science drills--to mold him into a prodigy. While Mrs. Nelson retreats into obsessive housewifery, the disappointed professor buries himself in work, emerging only to ensure that his son is "still breathing under the auspices of gravity and motion." When a head injury gives Nathan synesthesia (an inexplicable cross-wiring of the senses), it also confers on him the genius denied at birth, and his father embraces the freakish gift as a second chance. Unlike The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, Smith's historical and stylized debut, this novel is bathed in a Midwestern ordinariness that casts the Nelson family's oddities in stark relief. It's a world where success is not absolute, failure is not irredeemable, and the distance between the two is quite short indeed.

Some Reviews for The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

The Boston Globe
March 13, 2006

NOVEL IMAGINES THE FEVERED DECLINE OF LOUIS DAGUERRE
BY CLEA SIMON, GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

Memory is our first camera, capturing imperfectly images from our youth. Such images haunt French inventor Louis Daguerre in Dominic Smith's lyrical debut novel, "The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre." The namesake 19th-century protagonist, of course, won renown for his discovery of how to "fix" light-created pictures, creating the first proto-photographs or daguerreotypes. He did this using mercury, which undoubtedly contributed to his ill health later in life. But in Smith's poetic and darkly romantic fictional take on Daguerre's decline, the madness caused by this toxic element is also what spurs the inventor to follow up on his most poignant memory to seek the lost love of his youth.

Smith's Daguerre is a complicated man. Vaguely aware that his health has been compromised, he nonetheless succumbs to his delusions, fostering them as his latest discoveries. His most prominent delusion is that the world is ending. There's some reason for this: In 1849 Paris, society is fragile. Revolution, which Daguerre had survived in his youth, again rumbles in the streets. And while Daguerre has won acclaim (and a state pension) for his discoveries, he feels ambivalent about his fame, proud of his Legion of Honor cross but wearing it hidden beneath his shirt.

Such uncertainty is full of portents to his paranoid brain. "Signs were everywhere now," he thinks. "Men read poetry in the squares before bands of moved and cheering peasants. Funeral processions marched along the riverbanks with open coffins." Smith clues us in to the rational world, noting workers' strikes and bread lines. But Daguerre's delusions have a personal weight. As he becomes sicker and crazier, the world is indeed ending for him.

Not that Daguerre has many regrets. He has accomplished much. But before the end, he decides, he must fulfill some final wishes. Ever aware of his reputation, he creates a checklist of 10 images he wants to capture, which he shares with his younger friend, Charles Baudelaire. The idea intrigues the poet, who "believed in Louis Daguerre's apocalypse as an invention of the artistic mind, no different than a belief in God or Beauty or Piety." Baudelaire may quibble with a few items on the list, such as "a perfect apple." "The apple is not exotic enough," he complains. And he dismisses the last entry, one Isobel Le Fournier, as boring: "Lost love and all that how tiresome." But he agrees to aid his friend anyway, particularly with what seems the most difficult request: finding a nude model willing to pose during the long and arduous process of making a daguerreotype.

Is it any surprise that one goal leads to another, and that Daguerre does end up finding the woman he fell for on the same day that he discovered the play of light, at age 12? Perhaps not, but this inevitability does nothing to mar Smith's evocative work. In fact, the way Smith jumps back and forth in time, as well as between Daguerre's fevered mind and reality, nearly removes any element of predictability, instead immersing the reader in a fully imagined and wildly sensual world. With a keen sense of detail, the author re-creates the countryside of Daguerre's youth and his current Paris, and lets them mingle in suggestion and imagery. At a party with Baudelaire, for example, the inventor smells something "earthy and fungal" and is reminded of truffle-hunting pigs, their "bristling necks . . . bulging from short catches of rope." Soon after, he meets members of the demimonde who also seem to spring from his past, including Eggshell, a barmaid, and Pigeon, an "alleged cabaret dancer" and prostitute.

Isobel, when we finally find her, has also reconnected to this country past, as well as to the illnesses of Daguerre's youth and his present incapacity. But if finding her is not what the inventor imagines, neither, he realizes, is the future. As with his invention, Daguerre must learn to wait for the light. "I open the eye of the camera to something I sense is there but cannot fully name or see," he explains. Smith presents these visions in a similar fashion, images to be experienced and enjoyed.


The Dallas Morning News
Visions in the vapors
FICTION: Love and apocalypse mingle in the life of Daguerre
Sunday, February 19, 2006

By CHARLES EALY

Austin has a notable new novelist.

His name is Dominic Smith, and his debut historical novel, which is full of hallucinatory and beautifully rendered images, is titled The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre.

The setting is France in the 1840s, with Daguerre at the height of his acclaim as one of the founders of modern photography. But Daguerre also suffers from various maladies and delusions caused, in part, by his exposure to mercury vapors.

As Mr. Smith writes in his "Author's Note," Daguerre would "expose a sensitized plate inside a camera obscura, take the plate into a darkened room, then pass it back and forth above a heated mercury bath." The mercury drops would settle over the image, giving it luster and a minute level of detail.

But those same vapors begin to take a toll on Daguerre, whose Gothic visions open the novel, two years before the 1848 revolution rocked France. As Daguerre looks out his apartment's bathroom window, he senses the looming apocalypse that would hit Paris: "Men could sense oblivion coming, feel it in the knuckles and teeth." And he sees what looks like an albatross on the rooftop of Notre Dame. Then he sees that it's "a young girl in a white dress, her hands laced behind her back. She had felt wings pinned to her dress and she was going to jump from the ledge. She didn't jump; she leaned into the air in front of her and shot straight down."

The doom of such scenes would be oppressive if Mr. Smith didn't come up with an inventive way to hold our interest and give us hope. He does so by interspersing the gloom with tales of Daguerre's early childhood, when he loved and lost Isobel de Fournier. Just before the French Revolution in 1789, she was a maid on the estate where his father was head clerk.

Any alert reader will realize that Mr. Smith is setting up a reunion with Isobel, a moment of love regained, even if it comes after years of separation. But the joy of reading a novel often comes in the details, in the inevitable surprises and beauty of events along the way. And Mr. Smith provides plenty of those.

The early part of the book revolves around Daguerre's quest to photograph 10 things before his predicted apocalypse. And the list includes a beautiful naked woman, the perfect Paris boulevard, a perfect apple and his lost love, Isobel.

In his quest for a nude model, Daguerre enlists the help of the French poet Baudelaire. In Mr. Smith's hands, he is a droll and deadpan character, a frequent womanizer who introduces the photographer to a young prostitute. As it turns out, Chloe is the estranged daughter of Isobel. Thus begins Daguerre's expected journey back to love.

The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre is a richly promising start to the literary career of Mr. Smith, an Australia native who received a master's of fine arts degree from the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.

Historical fiction is rarely the easiest route for an aspiring novelist, especially when the author is in Austin and the plot takes place in mid-19th-century France. But Mr. Smith has found a vivid way of creating images. Just like the hero of his novel.


Kirkus Reviews(starred review)
DECEMBER 15, 2005

Smith's beautifully written debut uses the life of photography's inventor as the framework for a touching tale of youthful love regained in maturity.

In the spring of 1847, 58-year-old Louis Daguerre is wealthy and famous, thanks to his discovery of the process by which visual images can be given physical reality: "[H]ere was time stolen, wafered, and pressed onto silvered copper; here were nature's blueprints, transcripts of light . . . replicated in nuance, shadow, and substance." Mortally ill from exposure to the toxic chemicals used in that process, he's convinced by one of his "mercury visions" that the world is about to end. Daguerre asks his friend Charles Baudelaire to help him find a woman willing to pose naked for a daguerreotype; it's one of the images he wants to immortalize before the apocalypse. He's also trying to find Isobel Le Fournier, the family maid he fell in love with when he was 12, on the same day he first was mesmerized by the magical qualities of sunlight. Isobel slipped out of his life the year he went to Paris as apprentice to a scene painter, but Louis remained haunted by his lost love as he pursued his goal of capturing the world around him with a realism beyond painting. Skillfully interweaving Daguerre's memories with the present-day action, the author joins the two narrative strands when Louis learns that his nude model, Chloe, is Isobel's daughter (a wild coincidence that passes muster in the novel's dreamlike atmosphere). Violence, which has shadowed Daguerre's life since his birth during the French Revolution, once again marks him during the disturbances of 1848, when Louis is shot and Chloe takes him to her mother to be healed. In the countryside, the bitter older woman and her chastened but still-ardent suitor finally come to terms with their past and steal a few weeks of happiness they both know cannot last.

A compelling psychological study, a thoughtful tracing of the birth of a new art form and an atmospheric portrait of 19th-century France: impressive on all three counts.