Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1970. First Edition. 307 pages.
5.75 x 8.25 inches.
A Very Good+ Hardcover in a Good Dust Jacket. Jacket has some edgewear with a small ink stripe on spine and some
smoke discoloration (no odors that I can detect). Signed and
inscribed by the Author to Jane "One of the Original Two Hundred -
affectionately, Carolyn June, 1970".
Carolyn See is the author of
nine books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in
America, and advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and novels
There Will Never Be Another You and The Handyman.
She is the Friday-morning reviewer for The Washington Post, and she has been
on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and PENWest International.
She has won both the Guggenheim fellowship and the Getty Center fellowship.
She lives in Pacific Palisades, California.
See has also written books under the pen name Monica Highland, a name she
shared with two others, her daughter Lisa See and her longtime companion,
John Espey, who passed away in 2000.
See is known for writing novels set in Los Angeles and has co-edited books
that revolve around the city, including a book of short stories, LA Shorts,
and the pictorial books Santa Monica Bay: Paradise by the Sea : A Pictorial
History of Santa Monica, Venice, Marina Del Rey, Ocean Part, Pacific
Palisades, Topanga & Malibu, and The California Pop-Up Book, which
celebrates the city's unique architecture.
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."
- from
wikipedia
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