Traffic and Laughter

...Rather than developing these possibilities, though, Mooney just nods to his premise now and then, telling us that 378: Commonweal the present time is "one of the few since the Second World War [without] military conflict," that Michael grew up "in a trailer park in Los Alamos, New Mexico," and that the diplomats' briefing books refer to "the power of a thousand suns" (an echo of the phrase from the Bhagavad-Gita with which Robert Oppenheimer described the first atomic bomb detonation...

...Gay, himself, describes these eight essays as falling within the genre of serious fun...

...The novel is not so much a story as it is a series of linked incidents...

...Some are lighthearted, even tongue-in-cheek, others more somberly reflective and conjectural...

...When Nomanzi and Chentula come to Los Angeles in search of movie roles and record deals, the four meet in the first of many coincidences grounded in the novel's attempt to reinvent recent history...

...diplomat, is a disk jockey: her voice is "the sound of the city of angels," but her face is unrecognizable to passersby on the street...

...In the main, the novel moves at a deliberate and unvarying pace, with every conversation fully recorded, every freeway and restaurant copiously described...

...he has purported to reinvent the world and elicit our interest in it...

...FREUD OR DR...

...Michael had once seen the geological plates of the adjacent canyon slide apart in exactly this fashion...

...And on occasion he contrives a biting and true comic exchange: "What is it people say in America, Paul, when they feel their lives are somehow-how should I put it...

...lifted out of the ordinary, into something...momentarily grander...

...Set in Los Angeles in a time that feels like the present, it follows a group of characters who rather too clearly embody the publicprivate motif...

...The third, inferred more by what is not stated, is the subtle art of rebuttal...

...Sylvia Walters, elder daughter of a high-ranking U.S...

...The book's theme demands that its characters traffic in politics and entertainment, the subcultures where private and public lives most obviously intersect...

...They say, 'It's like a movie.'" However, Mooney hasn't set out merely to offer insights, artful prose, and comic relief...

...An extended comic riff on a biologist's romance with a dolphin, told in thick and sophisticated prose, it was a work of freewheeling erudition and energy...

...Eugene Taylor hy more Freud...

...Adopting as their creed the epigraph from Don D e L i l l o ' s Libra--"'Happiness [says Lee Harvey Oswald] is taking part in the struggle, where there is no borderline between one's own personal world, and the world in general'"--they would try to bridge the familiar gaps between public life and private life, history and intimacy, innovation and entertainment, a great work and a good read...

...After all, Professor Gay has already brought us five different works either about or including the Inventor of Psychoanalysis, and then topped that with his award winning biography Freud: A Life for Our Time(1988), which he followed with an anthology of readings...

...His plan is grandly conceived, but haphazardly executed, i : DR...

...Nomanzi Lolombela, the daughter of a diplomat for the emerging black Southern African nation Azania, stars in that country's hit TV show, and her half-brother Chentula leads Azania's most popular rock band: public figures in their homeland but unknowns abroad, they are people of mixed identity...

...Ted Mooney's first novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets (1981), suggested that he was such a writer...

...Mooney captures the self-consciousness of people for whom life is a role-playing exercise: "Halfway up the redwood steps, [Michael] caught his breath and stopped, struck unexpectedly by the premonition of a day in which this place, this house, this invented structure whose protection he was manfully miming, would simply cease to be...

...By his own direct statement, and by reading between the lines, the author of this little text gives us three reasons for yet an additional dose of the Psychoanalytic Wizard of Vienna...

...The diplomats Paul Walters and Joseph Lolombela are in Europe negotiating a treaty that will ban testing of a brand-new weapon--the atomic bomb, here called "the fission bomb" or "that fission bomb thing...

...But this approach frequently yields to mock filmscript scenarios, dream sequences, or selfconscious commentary by the narrator...

...Dullness is this novel's most vexing quality...

...There is much to admire in Mooney's rendering of these...

...Justified by an artist's rather than a pedant's sense of order, they include Freud's view on the real identity of Shakespeare, an interpretation of names Freud gave his children, Freud on free will and determinism, Freud's list of "ten good books," Freud's jokes, a fictitious review of The Interpretation of Dreams, a spoof on what if the inventor of psychoanalysis had been a German instead of a Jew, and a peek at letters between Freud and Minna Bemays, Freud's sister-in-law and alleged paramour...

...Waiters smiled...

...There, superiors like Tom Wolfe and Saul Bellow would encourage them to write complex, prophetic, interdisciplinary novels, which would reclaim the audience that literary fiction has ceded to thrillers and movies...

...Her new lover, Michael, creates special effects for movies, re-enacting sea battles from "the Allied invasion of Japan in November of 1945" at his suburban workspace...

...he had begun to see where Bloch was headed...

...And while one might expect that a world without a[omic weapons might differ from the real world in countless smaller ways, Mooney explores this only in a few flights of fancy...

...1 June 1991:379...

...Mooney's absence from the literary scene in the decade after its release implied that he had gone off somewhere to write a formidable follow-up to it...

...By the time we reach the novel's predictably explosive end, their public and private lives have been neatly wrapped: Sylvia is pregnant (a literary cipher for "intense private experience"), and all of them, joined by a producer with ties to a German diplomat, plan to make a movie...

...In the~ scenes of diplomacy, he reflects gracefully on the nature of politics: glancing at his fellow diplomats, Mooney writes, Waiters "was momentarily struck dumb by the beauty of the fiction by which this meeting had been convened: that a man could represent a country, that a country could represent its people...

...The first is for the love of fine scholarship as an end in itself...

...Depicting Sylvia and Michael's shared moments, he often comes up with images that deftly show history meeting intimacy: "She put the folders on the floor beside the open suitcase, where they slid into disarray...

...When Sylvia thinks of"Joyce's last novel, A Simple Tail...

...As the treaty talks falter, Walters's life is threatened, and the group leaves Los Angeles for Paris and South Africa, where Chentula's band plays at a peace-and-justice rally--the younger generation's version of diplomacy...

...so vivid, erotic, and loving a volume," the reader, rather than feeling a world remade, is reminded of how arbitrary and even lazy Mooney's remaking is...

...The second is to put a few finishing touches on the study of a life the way lives have been classically studied...

...Like Libra, whose imaginative reinvention of the Kennedy assassination it emulates, Traffic and Laughter has as its main / theme the merging of public and private lives in the fiction called history...

...A novelist can play fast and loose with language, form, facts, history--as long as doing so increases our interest...

...His efforts in this regard are surprisingly clumsy and halfhearted...

...So what went wrong...

...Easy Travel to Other Planets derived its charm from the fact that Mooney employed his learning and verbal gifts in the service of sheer whimsy...

...Such laziness extends to simpler matters of verisimilitude...

...In Traffic and Laughter, having chosen a premise with great moral and formal implications, he has failed to rise to the larger challenge...

...Setting the invention of the atomic bomb in the present day seems at first to be an inspired move, one that will lead him--and us--to envision all the ways in which the world order might be different, and thus to see the world with new eyes...

...In response to Walters's support of the Azanian cause, a khaki-clad espionage figure has begun to harass Sylvia and Michael, reminding them that the public world of diplomacy is one a diplomat's daughter can never escape...

...Because they aren't all that interesting, Mooney's tricks seem not only poorly done, but irresponsible as well...

...These novices would employ all the styles of postwar writing, drawing on the sprawling works of Pynchon and Garcia Marquez as well as the spare domestic stories thought to have dominated recent American fiction...

...Sure enough, Traffic and Laughter is just the kind of book that could be expected to earn the highest praise in my seminary of fiction--freewheeling, erudite, energetic, a bold attempt to be all things to all people...

...READING FREUD Explorations and Entertainments Peter Gay Yale University Press, $24.95, 204 pp...

...But these subcultures are carelessly presented, undermining the plausibility of the novel as a whole...

...One imagines fifty more years of conventional wars, no cold war or deterrence, a militant Japan, a new set of European alliances, an absence of apocalyptic dread, and so on...

...Some readers might seek delight instead in Mooney's aggressively odd sense of structure...

...FRAUD...