My fear is that I won't, although more likely, I can't, do this one the justice it deserves. Imagine this, if you will, but after the insertion of an additional hand, each hand drawing another, three hands simultaneously drawing one of the other hands. Now with that firmly in mind, forget it, and imagine three stories told by one or another (or each) character; that's Faces in the Crowd.A contemporary Mexican mother, living in Mexico City, is writing a novel. A Mexican woman who works as a translator in a publishing house is charged with learning more about Gilberto Owen, an author the house will publish--writing his story, but she knows her story is fictional, contrived. Gilberto Owen, who lived in New York earlier than either woman, is a Mexican author/poet and is writing a novel; it might be about the future.What's happening, he said, is that you can remember the future, too.Lovely. My kind of fiction.As the three stories unfold, characters overlap, elements of one life appear, in some form, in another's. Characters gain prominence, or fade away. Character's seem parts of her story, No, hers, No not hers, rather his. They become nebulous. They converge. Ghostlike. Ghosts. Each haunting anther's story, or maybe his or her own. Not a fragmented novel. A horizontal novel, narrated vertically.Sections, segments, strands of stories are told in shorts blasts. A one-line section, a paragraph section, a page-and-a-half section. Vaguery. Vagary. Spreading out and in.Or a horizontal novel, told vertically. A hotizontal vertigo.This has the feel of an Alejandro Zambra story, told by David Markson, translated by Javier Marias, edited and published by Enrique Vila-Matas (before finding its way to Dalkey Archive), and with the Cesar Aira Seal of Approval. It also boasts a supporting cast of Ezra Pound, Federico Garcia Lorca, et al., (or their ghosts). Four point something stars, rounded up because it found me at the right time.