Kinescope

A lost New Year’s hour survives only as a kinescope: a film pointed at a monitor. In the curved glass the studio floor comes up like a dark country, and for eleven seconds a dancer lies among the cables while the host toasts midnight. Kinescope follows Tullio Gravina, a film conservator who has been trained to notice extra furniture in a frame, through a can that was paid to be lost and paid again to be kept. The official wording was weakness. The sprockets disagree. Written in a voice that argues with itself and loses entertainingly, the novel treats archives as a poorly kept conscience: a wife who must recuse from a board, a daughter who wants an arm not a preface, a counsel who calls reflections weather, a truck operator who marked the seconds and hid the can under a blanket. The mystery is a picture of a picture. The comedy is philosophical and a little cruel. Glass remembers what trucks forget. The dead do not lecture. The living keep winding them.