The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Missing Piece, by Antoine Bello
reviewed by Tim Feeney

Antoine Bello. The Missing Piece. Trans. Helen Stevenson. Harcourt, 2003. 248 pp. Paper: $14.00.

The professional speed-puzzle circuit, having been established by an American billionaire/jigsaw-puzzle enthusiast and promoted to World Series-levels of international popularity, is shaken when star players are targeted by a killer who doses his victims with Pentothal, hacks off one of their limbs, and replaces it with a Polaroid showing the corresponding limb of a different victim. Bello’s inventiveness throughout is impressive, satirizing professional sports and contemporary literary criticism, and he offers readers a lot to play with in the process: color-commentators’ breathless (and culturally tactless) descriptions of puzzle assembly, the controversy surrounding the world’s most difficult puzzle (the suspiciously French “Pantone 138,” a square tray housing a thousand identical half-inch-square pieces that can produce billions of indistinguishable combinations, “But only one of them is correct”), the political machinations of the academic Puzzology Society, exploits of the savant Spillsbury and the ragingly libidinous Olof Niels, academic treatises on the “universal equilibrium configuration for the puzzle” (discovering what happens when workmen simultaneously build and demolish a wall), and on and on, all of it related via newspaper clippings, minutes of meetings, e-mail, magazine articles, television transcriptions, and the like. Most of it is very funny, and the satire fires in all directions. This novel is ostensibly a mystery, though, and the last chapter of the book gamely presents a solution, but it’s doubtful that readers will care who the culprit is—the book’s originality is far more interesting than the whodunit aspects, and the narrative lags a little toward the end, when narrative ennui sets in and Bello’s treatment of the puzzle conceit begins to lack the ironic humor of the rest of the novel. It’s a first-novel flaw, but it’s overlookable: The Missing Piece is ultimately very good. Add Bello to the long list of folks you should be keeping an eye on.