“Art, for an impressionist, is a bad tease,” states Giovanni Bernini, the protagonist of Jacob Rubin’s debut novel, “The Poser.” According to Giovanni, art can be mimicked, but never to the satisfaction of the mimicker. For always out of reach in these objects is what he calls something or someone’s “thread”—that is, the essence of a person which peeks through his or her disguise. It is just this human spark that is so delightfully present in Rubin’s own work. Through his cartoonish characters and magical realist premise, Rubin has managed to tease out some fundamental aspects of the human condition in a way that makes his new novel genuinely exciting.

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The concept that “The Poser” lays out is thoroughly original. Giovanni Bernini is not only blessed with a talent that allows him to imitate any person, animal, or inanimate object—he is also compelled to do so at all times. This has two vital implications. First, Giovanni must frequently repress the urge to mimic strangers and friends wherever he goes. Often Giovanni’s impressions burst forth uncontrollably, causing trouble in many of his relationships. But second, and more importantly, no one, not the reader nor even Giovanni himself, knows who the real Giovanni is. He is merely a vessel, a blank canvas, a book unwritten.

This bold premise, and a smattering of plot points along the way, begin to cross a line into magical realism. Bernard, who owns the establishment where Giovanni gets his start as a performer, provides fodder for imitation so delicious that Giovanni becomes addicted to it like a drug. Later, another character discovers he has an allergy to money—or, more precisely, “to those objects that through any concatenation of events led me to money.” Contact with such objects imbued with the idea of money causes this man to break out in a terrible full-body rash.

As with most magical realism, what would superficially belong in the realm of fantasy is in fact deeply representative of the realities of life in human society. Though Giovanni is an unconventional individual, and his ability goes far beyond the bounds of realistic possibility, his central predicaments—feeling unsure of his true self, mirroring other people, and constantly feeling like a fraud—are, in fact, universal angsts heightened to the level of the magical. Within Giovanni himself and through his eclectic observations, Rubin manages to explore many facets of human nature without overextending himself. In particular, Giovanni notices the ways in which every individual masks who he or she is and pretends, even subconsciously, to be someone or something else. He has insights into the behavioral trends of whole professions—from actors, to prostitutes, to politicians, to therapists. Through observation alone, Giovanni quickly catches on to certain patterns. He notices, for instance, that the key to a politician’s speech, “was to have said things so many times that when you were delivering the line…you weren’t ever thinking about the words, but about some essential, misdirected thing.”

Rubin’s language is luscious but never overdone. Giovanni describes his grade school crush as “the chandelier of my brain.” And, after a night spent in the arms of fellow performer Lucy Starlight, he recalls, “I woke at dawn, kind of jet-lagged to be on Earth.” With his knack for constructing the perfect analogy, Giovanni breaks down in a mere sentence or two the mechanisms of many previously unilluminated gestures. Imitating Bernard, for example, he nods “in the jaunty, unserious way of a drug person, that is to say, as if some jazz, audible only to me, were playing in a nearby room.” On a separate occasion he tries imitating the expression his friend and agent, Max, outside by the pool—“as if the sun were a grandmother pinching his cheek.” Like a reverse magician who draws the audience’s attention to the trick rather than the misdirection, Rubin through Giovanni elucidates for his readers the minute details of human behavior.

However, there are moments when language is an obfuscating force in “The Poser.” Certain surreal and disjointed passages meant to convey tangled emotional states are unsuccessful and difficult to follow. In a highly medicated state following a mental breakdown, Giovanni recounts the whereabouts of his body as a foreign entity. But the excerpt becomes confusing when the narrator adds in synesthetic descriptions and hallucinations: “Fractures would open in its fingers and around its ankles…Soon its legs would shear off at the knee.” These moments, though they go awry, are few and far between, and they demonstrate Rubin’s willingness to experiment with style in the service of honestly depicting his protagonist’s experience.

The novel also has an impressive sense of movement, both physical and temporal, though its setting at any given time is ambiguous, riddled with fictional locations that hint at real ones. The book is split into three sections, each against a backdrop distinct from the last. While the story begins to drag in the middle section, the third and final segment of the novel breaks from conventional writing wisdom in the way only a talented writer can, quite literally psychoanalyzing its main character and explaining outright much of the deeper existential meaning behind Giovanni’s condition. This is all done without seeming patronizing or entirely exposing the “man behind the curtain.” In fact, this section is perhaps the strongest of the book, tying it together quite beautifully with just the right amount of realism and sentimentality.

Giovanni’s powers of imitation may impossibly defy any existing impressionist’s limitations, but his ability to articulate all the subtleties of human behavior that so often go unnoticed is entirely real. The novel is full of insights into human nature, as if Rubin himself had some sort of arcane power. In its totality, “The Poser” is a debut novel that demonstrates inspiring originality—of premise, of plot, and of style.

—Staff writer Mia J. P. Gussen can be reached at mia.gussen@thecrimson.com.