All Will Be Revealed

An eccentric, exotic photographer is drawn to a beautiful psychic in a turn-of-the-century novel about love, possession, adventure, and greed.At the close of the nineteenth century, wheelchair-bound Augustus Auerbach’s only interest is his extraordinarily lucrative business: the manufacture and marketing of pornographic pictures. His outlook is forever altered, however, when one of his models pressures him to attend a séance. It is there that Augustus meets the medium Verena Swann, a beautiful widow who gives voice to the long-dead spirit of his mother. At the time of her first encounter with Augustus, Verena is close to nervous collapse, overwhelmed by the demands of her clients who are half-mad with yearning for their deceased loved ones. Her spiritual powers have begun to fail her, and now, forced to fake her public trances, she wonders if her ability to converse with the spirits was ever more than self-delusion.Though initially reluctant, Augustus embarks on a series of private sittings with Verena, finding himself increasingly drawn to her as much for personal reasons as for the proof of immortality she offers him. Verena, meanwhile, is torn between three men: Augustus, the millionaire pornographer; Theodore Swann, Verena’s adventurer husband, killed on an expedition to the North Pole; and Leopold Swann, Verena’s brother-in-law and business partner who has decided that their next and greatest conquest will be Augustus himself.

From Publishers Weekly

Set in late 19th-century New York City, Siegel's second novel (after All the Money in the World) provides a fascinating tour of a pornographer's studio and a reluctant spiritual medium's parlor. Crippled from a childhood illness, the reclusive Augustus Auerbach has built a fortune in the pornography business; largely confined to his opulent mansion and rarely encountering people who are not employees or models, Auerbach is as incurious about others' lives as he is clueless about his own. His controlled existence begins to unravel when one of his models brings him to a séance conducted by the widowed (and crooked) medium, Verena Swann, who apparently connects him with the spirit of his self-absorbed and long-dead mother. As Verena attempts to escape her fraudulent vocation and the manipulative proposals of her business partner and brother-in-law, Leopold, an improbable romance blossoms between her and Auerbach. Siegel lays bare Verena's and Augustus's vulnerabilities as skillfully as they exploit those of others, but the novel's conclusion, which turns on Leopold's implausible machinations, fails to live up to its early promise. Readers willing to forgive the ending will find a richly detailed and seedily seductive narrative. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In early-nineteenth-century New York, Augustus Auerbach, crippled since childhood, is obsessed with his highly lucrative work as a pornographer. Convinced that he is the pioneer of a new art form, he obsesses day and night over the details of his photographic sessions; he almost never goes outside and maintains only the most superficial relationships with his servants and employees. Then one of his most prized models talks him into attending a seance with spiritualist Verena Swann, whose gift has been exploited and augmented with fake special effects by her brother-in-law. When Verena appears to put Augustus in touch with his long-dead and much-loved mother, Augustus finds that he is no longer satisfied with the isolated life he has been living. Siegel is skillful at incorporating into his narrative many fascinating details about photography and spiritualism. In addition, he draws readers into the emotional lives of two stunted people who exploit others' vulnerabilities while failing to understand their own. This well-crafted novel offers both an unusual plotline and richly atmospheric settings. Joanne WilkinsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Verena Swann sat beside her brother-in-law, Leopold Swann, writing with a pencil in a large leather notebook. Head to one side, eyes half-closed, she watched her hand move across the page, leaving behind line after line of small jagged letters–the nearly illegible scrawl of her late husband, Captain Theodore Swann. She had no idea what it said, of course; the deciphering was for later, after the rush of words. All she could think of right now was the pressure on the back of her neck, the tingling in her arm, the motion of her hand. All that mattered was the indescribable feeling of being borrowed, a sensation as strange as her first intimate kiss.She reached the bottom and Leopold turned the page for her.At that very moment, Augustus Auerbach guided his wheelchair into the photographic studio behind his Fifth Avenue mansion. As big as a warehouse and built entirely of glass, it felt less like a building than a porthole for viewing the sky. Auerbach glanced up at the clouds, then wheeled himself across the stone floor to the bed at the center. As he did so, his two photographic models removed their dressing gowns and stretched themselves naked on the sheets. His assistant took up position behind the camera.“Let us begin with a kiss,” said Auerbach, and watched as the models fit themselves together like the two halves of a broken cup. None of them could know that a dozen photographs later, despite careful precautions, an accident would occur: a child would be conceived.Auerbach put his hand to his chin. “A little more passion, please.”Thousands of miles away, a group of men on dog sleds stopped before a canvas tent half-buried in snow. For weeks they had traveled the vast ice plain in search of that tent, till the size of the land and its utter emptiness shrank them to nothing. They had become like ants crawling over the surface of a mirror. Now the sky seemed made of ice, the ice around them made of sky. The sun burned beneath their feet. One of them dismounted and walked over to the tent, then parted the flaps and crawled inside. After removing his glacier glasses he could make out a footlocker, a backpack, a pair of boots set in a corner, and a snowsuit laid out as if to dry. Eventually, he forced himself to look at the corpse lying on top of the sleeping bag, naked: the earthly remains of Captain Theodore Swann, missing three years and presumed lost.At the table in her parlor, Mrs. Swann watched her hand move across the page:You see, my dear, there is nothing other than this turning, round and round again. Everything is connected to everything else, everything moves in a great wheel, and the emptiness at the center is God.

About the Author

Robert Anthony Siegel was born in New York City and educated at Harvard, the University of Tokyo, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, where he lives with his wife, the writer Karen E. Bender, and their two children, Jonah and Maia. He has received fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Education, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown. All Will Be Revealedis his second novel, following 1997’s All the Money in the World.

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