Douglas Myles, the main character of Tom Williams’ novella, The Mimic’s Own Voice is a man perpetually out of context. Or a man with no context at all, looking for surroundings which can define him in a legible way. A man of mixed race, born in a time and place where that was still uncommon, the tight-knit family which held together his early years dead and, most importantly, an almost supernatural talent for mimicking others' voices, a talent which lost its audience decades before Myles was born. He rediscovers the mimics of the past through film in the library where he works, feels an affinity with these comedians, all nearly dead and mostly forgotten, and seeks to carve out a place in the world where he belongs.
Looking for an audience, Myles becomes an international superstar, a household name. But, as the novella’s tragic but inevitable conclusion reveals, the public never really knew him at all.
Author Tom Williams employs an academic/biographic tone to investigate Myles’ life, but also to give life to the fictional world in which Douglas Myles lived. Williams crafts a kind of alternate reality where comics are the supreme entertainers, paid pensions by a union and drawing in crowds by the thousands. Scholars of Comedic Studies gather at the Pratt-Falls Center for academic round-tables on the lives of great comedians, and even small Midwestern towns boast a dozen comedy clubs. Williams populates this world with debating scholars whose theories are mentioned, put in conversation with one another, and debunked, comedians who knew, feuded with, and inspired Douglas Myles, and fans who waited all night for a chance to be mimicked themselves.
Williams uses an anonymous scholar as narrator, which makes Myles more the subject of the story than the main character. The book itself is full of complementary voices: the dry style of an academic who is, nonetheless, quite funny himself, numerous quotes from other sources, and a manuscript discovered in Douglas Myles’ house after his death. The manuscript, something of an autobiography, seems to be written for Myles himself, so is written with a beautiful simplicity that weaves beautifully into the scholarly narrative.
The manuscript represents one of the few moments when the mimic chooses to speak in his own voice. However, critics and publishers are flustered to find that what is important enough to Douglas Myles to write down are not the same things that are important to his followers and fans. He writes of personal moments, of memories, and things no one would likely understand. He speaks in his own voice, and in his own language.
Despite the layers of voices and styles, nothing about this book feels pastiche-ey or cobbled-together. Williams expertly subordinates each to the larger narrative, the academic story of Douglas Myles, and incorporates his source material smoothly into something more like a quilt than a collage, or like an onion. Much like an onion, though, when Williams peels back the layers of Myles’ life, the reader is left only with more onion.
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 3, 2011.