Worlds of Trouble By DANIELLE TRUSSONI

Worlds of Trouble

By DANIELLE TRUSSONI

THE SAME RIVER TWICE

By Ted Mooney

362 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95

     To shape the everyday happenings of the world into a good story — isn’t that what novelists are supposed to do best? Yet readers must often choose between “literary fiction,” understood to be works of well-written but meandering prose about the “real world” of human relationships, and “commercial fiction,” fast-paced novels in which plot is everything. The literary is assumed to be cerebral and artistic, the commercial mindless and entertaining. One suspects that nobody is completely happy with this divide. So it is a joy to discover, every once in a while, a writer whose prose and plotting take something from both camps. As Ted Mooney proves in his nuanced literary thriller “The Same River Twice,” it is perfectly possible to find a novel that has it all.

     Mooney’s tale begins when Odile, a Parisian clothing designer happily married to an art-film auteur, agrees to acquire Soviet-­era May Day banners with a partner and courier them out of Russia for a significant fee. Instructed to “pay whatever was asked” for the flags, Odile buys 30 of them for $50,000. After completing the mission and boarding their train back to Paris, Odile’s partner, an assistant professor at the Sorbonne, disappears. Odile returns to Paris alone, takes the flags to the American dealer who has orchestrated the entire affair and hurries home, only to find her 13th Arrondissement apartment ransacked.

     Her husband, Max, meanwhile, is having a mid-career crisis that inspires him to ditch his current project — a bankable film with the starlet Isabelle H. attached — to experiment with his own version of cinéma vérité. In the next days, Odile and Max become entangled in a web of intrigues that endanger their marriage and their lives. Enter a cut-throat Russian businessman, two ruthlessly ambitious and beautiful young women and a scheme to make unlimited amounts of cash — and voilà, you’re caught up in the momentum of a great story.

     “The money is in the truck with my driver,” Odile says with gun moll aplomb as she buys the May Day flags from a band of black-market merchants. “If I like them, he will pay you. He has a gun.” Odile is “a cool customer,” but she is also the kind of woman who is subject to recurrent dreams, intuitions, episodes of déjà vu and “esoteric synaptic events.” Although religion holds no interest for her and she doesn’t consider self-denial a virtue, there is something of the mystic in Odile. She holds a private conviction that “she would renounce the world and its ten thousand excruciations” to “retreat into solitude and live her life as an ascetic,” even as she doubts her “own freedom to make such decisions.” Yet Odile is enraptured by the physical beauty of her surroundings. Standing before the Opéra Bastille, she perceives that “a veil had been lifted to reveal a scene completely new to her, one in which every particular was strange and without precedent. She knew where she was, but each thing she saw was the first of its kind: the first bicyclist, the first wine carafe, the first woman to tie a sweater around her waist by the arms.” The conventional thriller dame of the first Odile meets the sensitive introvert of the second, creating a wonderful frisson. The contrast makes Odile a magnificent character.

     Mooney’s passion for detail lies behind this, of course. He has an artist’s eye for color and texture. A figure in a Giacometti drawing is “shimmering into being of its own accord” in a way that is “bewitching and troubling in equal measure.” The May Day flags are “piled against a wall in smoldering array.” Such descriptive richness might be expected from a writer who was senior editor at Art in America magazine for more than 30 years. In fact, Mooney’s art-world descriptions are so enchanting that one fully believes that a savvy American art dealer would hire an inexperienced, non-Russian-speaking Parisian clothing designer to travel thousands of kilometers by train to hunt down Soviet-era artifacts from street markets in Moscow and smuggle them back to Paris.

     Perhaps that is why, when the details feel off, the effect is disorienting. Odile goes to Moscow sometime in the late 1990s, yet the Russia Mooney describes has a distinctly cold war ambience. A fellow passenger on the train from Moscow to Paris, an American student traveling from Beijing, had changed his renminbi into rubles on entry, only to discover that the rubles “couldn’t be taken out of the country” upon departure. Rather than have it confiscated, he spends all of his money on Caspian caviar and Georgian champagne. It’s a small detail, but in 1998 it was legal to bring rubles out of Russia. Whether the ruble was worth much in 1998 — it crashed that year — is another question. A more glaring distortion involves the repercussions of taking the May Day flags through border control. Just before he disappears, Odile’s partner offers to bring the flags through customs at Brest alone, warning Odile that if “something goes wrong, they have only one of us to execute.” Execution of French citizens for bringing flags out of Russia? Fifty years earlier, one might have ended up in Siberia, but in the 1990s the punishment would have been considerably less harsh than the firing squad.

     Most likely, Mooney played up cold-war-era menace in the service of creating dramatic tension, and in this respect, Russia functions as it was meant to. One is too wrapped up in the drama to bother with Google. Indeed, when a truly frightening nemesis arrives in the person of Kolya ­Kukushkin, a Russian banker who will torture and kill to get what he wants, all thought of life-­threatening customs agents disappears. Kukush­kin is a classic villain, both charming and terrifying, whose influence is more pervasive than Odile and Max realize.

     At one point, feeling adrift, Odile buys a ticket to John Huston’s “Maltese Falcon,” the classic film-noir adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s detective novel. She takes a “third-row center seat in the darkened theater, and delivers herself gratefully” into the brilliant distraction of the story. “A hundred minutes later she emerged refreshed. The world depicted in the film, for all its duplicity, innuendo and fruitless striving, resembled the real world only in part. Why she should draw strength from this utterly ordinary observation, available to virtually anyone on earth for the price of a movie ticket, was beyond her, but as she started east on Boulevard St.-Germain she felt its power in every step she took.” Whether Odile’s experience is one of artistic communion or pure escapism, a cerebral appreciation of film noir or her own private guilty pleasure, it is impossible to tell. In the end, if one is mesmerized by a storyteller’s gifts, what does it matter?

Danielle Trussoni’s most recent book is the novel “Angelology.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Trussonit.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print