European intrigues executed by rich cast of characters

June 01, 2010|Carlo Wolff

‘The Same River Twice’’ is a philosophical entertainment doubling as a riveting, unconventional thriller. Largely set in a pre-European Union Paris and rendered with such painterly depth that the luminous city nearly becomes a character, Ted Mooney’s fourth novel explores issues of mutability against fixity, evolution against stasis, art against artifice, and the vexing allure of an affair against the security of marriage.

Mooney launches his dazzling tale in Moscow, where clothing designer Odile Mevel and her partner, Thierry Colin, have been dispatched to buy contraband, Soviet-era banners for an American hustler eager to cash in on the craze for all things iconic. On their way back to Paris to deliver the May Day pennants to the art dealer Turner, Thierry mysteriously disappears, leaving unclaimed his share of the payment promised to the pair. .

Meanwhile, Odile’s husband, Max Colby, a filmmaker, has discovered that someone has been making and distributing unauthorized copies of “Fireflies,’’ his best-known film. The bootlegs feature a different ending, however. Max mounts an inquiry into who might have perpetrated this fraud, which eventually points him in the direction of the Russian mafia.

There are many more meanwhiles, involving subjects as disparate as smuggled folk art and stem-cell research, but elaborating on them would disentangle too much of the web Mooney so expertly weaves. This is about trickery and deception; even the resolutions are ambiguous.

It also is about the dangerous romantic attractions in which Odile and Turner and, to a lesser extent, Max, indulge. And about the nature of creativity itself: An intriguing subplot in a work bursting with them centers on Max’s effort to raise his profile by making a new, reality-based kind of cinema starring “Isabelle H,’’ apparently a reference to French film star Isabelle Huppert.

The novel would not succeed without effective, closely observed characters, which Mooney, a former editor of Art in America, delivers in spades. He gets inside their heads, particularly Odile, a “cool customer’’ whose desires conflict with her need for stability; Turner, a canny salesman who bends the law to procure artistic currency; and a Russian entrepreneur named Kukushkin, whose operations straddle every world in this effortlessly worldly book.