Ted Mooney toys with your attention span but it’s worth it
Ted Mooney lives to grab readers by the throat and to achieve it he usually begins his novels with outrageous sex scenes. In Mooney’s debut novel Easy Travel to Other Planets Melissa the marine biologist mates with Peter the dolphin in a research tank on a remote Caribbean island. Then in Traffic and Laughter a Los Angeles radio station traffic helicopter rescues disc jockey Sylvia Walters and movie special-effects specialist Michael Bonner from a wildfire they disregard while in the throes of coitus. Finally in Singing into the Piano Edith Emerson a United Nations translator gives a very public hand job to Andrew Caldwell an estate lawyer during a New York City political fundraiser for Mexican presidential candidate and former World Cup soccer star Santiago Diaz.
So what’s next? Something different. In his latest The Same River Twice Mooney introduces his female protagonist French clothing designer Odile Mével as she makes her way along a rundown stretch of Tsvetnoy Bulvar in central Moscow. Mével is seeking contraband artwork abandoned by the now-defunct Soviet Union.
Mooney — Guggenheim Fellow retired editor-in-chief of Art in America Yale University professor and international sophisticate — is a rare bird whose wide-ranging novels span the globe. Aside from such notable exceptions as John Ralston Saul and Jane Alison few contemporary novelists write such multi-regional fiction. With The Same River Twice Mooney kicks it up a notch moving the central location of the novel with brief visits to Moscow and New York out of the United States entirely to Paris.
Although he incessantly plays games of brinkmanship with the attention span and intellectual ken of his audience he also actively cultivates a sensibility of local street life in every city to which he travels by spending considerable time there. For this reason Mooney’s depiction of an ecstasy-charged rave scene hosted by Parisian anarchists attended by Mével and located in the catacombs underneath Paris proves natural and poignant.
Mooney engineers worlds in collision; whichever world the reader understands rings true; whichever world the reader finds alien Mooney makes comprehensible via deft yet unassuming prose.
In The Same River Twice all these worlds — the art world the film community boat-dwellers on the Seine Parisian anarchists the international criminal underground — collide in the universe of Paris. Mooney always succinctly compartmentalizes astute observations (many credit Mooney with coining the phrase “information sickness”) and in this portrait of the city of lights Mooney generously applies his gift for cogent depiction.
