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Wildly inventive novel melds science, love

By Traci J. Macnamara , Special to the Rocky

Published February 22, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Pigeons

Photo by The Rocky / 2002

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Samantha Hunt's new novel wows readers into believing that pigeons can talk and humans can pass through the gates of time. Is it any wonder the author recently received the National Book Foundation's first "5 under 35" Award, recognizing "gifted young writers" ?

If you haven't read Hunt's acclaimed debut, The Seas, it's time to get on board with her newest work, The Invention of Everything Else. Here, she creates a world in which science meets imagination and fact flirts with fiction - a story based on real-life inventor Nikola Tesla that is at once quirky and fanciful, intelligent and profound.

The Invention of Everything Else tells the story of legendary Serbian inventor Tesla and a friendship he develops with the fictional Louisa, a young chambermaid who works at the Hotel New Yorker. When Louisa first meets the destitute and virtually forgotten inventor in 1943, he is living in one of the hotel's rooms on the 33rd floor. Tesla, conducting an electrical experiment, has just caused a total blackout in the hotel, a behemoth of a building that produced enough energy to support 35,000 people.

When Louisa asks him how he stole the electricity, he replies: "I didn't steal it, dear." And stepping closer to her, he explains: "It was always mine."

Tesla invented radio, radar, remote control, florescent lighting, the X-ray, the AC motor, the Tesla coil and much more, but most Americans don't learn much about his work in school. Guglielmo Marconi is often credited with inventing the radio, even though Tesla's patent predates his by four years. Tesla believed that his inventions belonged to the whole world, and he gave away his patents in contrast to the capitalist inventors of his day.

As a child, Tesla already was inclined to seek out new solutions to common problems. Hunt tells the story of how, at age 8, Tesla invented a way to harness the power of insects by gluing June bugs to a wheel. The result, Tesla says, was "brilliant, and for a few moments I burned with this brilliance."

Despite such brilliance, Tesla lived his final years alone in New York City hotel rooms, a starving artist-inventor whose only companions were pigeons, while others grew rich capitalizing on the profits of his work.

In this book, a shared love of pigeons solidifies the friendship between Louisa and Tesla during the last week of the inventor's life. The ever-curious chambermaid can't help but snoop around in Tesla's room, and besides delivering his requested 18 towels a day, she dips into a stack of personal papers to learn about Tesla's past. When Tesla discovers Louisa in his room, their conversation shifts to the pigeons that flock to the window ledge. Instead of threatening to turn her in, Tesla simply escorts Louisa out the door, and she returns the next day to continue reading where she left off.

The novel's chapters alternate between Tesla and Louisa, whose stories develop within a narrative that also includes several other eccentric characters. On the same day that she sees Tesla for the first time, Louisa meets a handsome young mechanic named Arthur Vaughn, who seems to remember details from a shared childhood that Louisa can't recall. Louisa's father, meanwhile, is occupied with a plan to disappear in a homemade time machine with his friend Azor, who has spent the past two years developing one in Far Rockaway, Queens.

Besides the time machine, this book's more imaginative elements - which include a talking pigeon that Tesla relates to as his wife - could seem corny or overly contrived. But Hunt successfully manages to balance them with explorations of deeper themes. The role of dreams, imagination, invention and love are central to the plot, and Hunt's Tesla justifies her approach when he says: "Extraordinary things happen all the time even when we're awake."

The Invention of Everything Else covers an ambitious new territory that is part science, part biography and part history. At times, Hunt's writing is experimental, as Tesla's work was, and her book is a literary invention that succeeds in resurrecting one of the world's greatest inventors who may have otherwise been left forgotten.

Best of all, Hunt employs a clever writing style to blend these elements, creating a fantastically readable book. The Invention of Everything Else is a remarkable tribute to science, invention, imagination and love.

Traci J. Macnamara is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in national magazines, journals and books. She lives in Boulder.

The Invention of Everything Else

* By Samantha Hunt. Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $24.

* Grade: A

Pigeon talk

According to press material, Hunt had her own mysterious run-ins with pigeons while writing The Invention of Everything Else. When her writing was going well, she noticed that she would "see a beautifully checkered bird or a blue bar with an opalescent hackle or an entire flock circling overhead making gorgeous loop-de- loops."

And on bad writing days?

"It seems all I'd see were the sickest of birds," she says, "those with mangled feet, those who had taken a bath in cooking oil, or, the worst, a dead bird lying belly-up on the sidewalk. It became difficult not to take editorial advice from these birds."

Comments

  • February 22, 2008

    2:19 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    oddjob1947 writes:

    >Tesla invented radio,
    sort of. He held some patents, never came up with
    a workable/practical system.

    > radar,
    Not really.

    > remote control,
    Sort of.

    > fl[u]orescent lighting,
    sort of.

    > the X-ray,
    Not: Roentgen

    > the AC motor,
    Some kinds.
    Also improvements to alternators, transformers.

    Tesla was brilliant, however much 'imaginative
    silliness' has been writ about him.

    best