The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces

 #136
Title: The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces
Author: Ray Vukcevich
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
Year: 2000
Genre: mystery/suspense, fantasy & science fiction
245 pages 

This is a mystery that can't quite pull all of its components together. However, Vukcevich is often funny and sometimes outrageously so. As does Lethem in Gun, with Occasional Music, Vukcevich spoofs many of the conventions of the noir detective novel. Like the protagonists of Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Skylight Howells has characteristics that let (or make) him view the world from an unusual perspective. In Skylight's case, it's multiple perspectives--either he has a partially integrated form of dissociative (multiple) identity disorder, or he's really good at shifting his ego state. Either way, some parts of him are better than others at the various tasks associated with detective work. Vukcevich creates a character who is both competent and somewhat pathetic. Encounters along the way with the Russian mafia, secret kitchen rites, cybersex, computer documention, and the heartbreak of tap-dancing addiction almost work, but not quite. Like Skylight himself, the parts just miss coming together. I can enjoy that as a textual parallel to the protagonist's condition; if you can, too, or would enjoy the setup at least as much as you'd enjoy a more satisfactory conclusion to the mystery, read it.