''My Life in CIA'' -- a knowing acquaintance in the book points out that insiders never use the article ''the''; it's not the C.I.A., simply C.I.A. -- begins as a memoir; recollective, argumentative and amusing. The ''Harry Mathews'' character makes it clear that he isn't gay, though he often dines with a gay friend, nor is he very rich, though he has a small inheritance that, combined with his novelist's ingenuity, allows him to live well. And he's not C.I.A.
But the rumor persists and begins to irritate him. So a friend comes up with a splendidly bad idea: if saying you're not in the C.I.A. means you are, cross to the other side of the hall of mirrors and say you are -- now disbelief is leverage in your favor, right? His narrator then proceeds to act in what he imagines to be a C.I.A.-like manner; he delivers a mysterious box (cigars) to a headwaiter, makes pink chalk marks on walls, though no dead drops follow, and sets up what he means to look like a proprietary -- a company owned by an intelligence service, designed as a cover for clandestine work. That does it. Elements of the secret world -- the French intelligence service, the Mossad and, yes, the C.I.A. itself -- now come sliding out of the night.
