Roberta Smoodin`s ”Inventing Ivanov” resembles all good novels in that it`s basically an elaborately constructed conceit. But in this case, the author goes a step further and purposely keeps the reader off balance and doubting whether the events being related actually happened to the main character, Ivan Ivanov, a Nabokov-like Russian emigre author.
The story revolves around a UCLA Slavic languages professor, E. Michael Ross, and his attempts to research a biography of the aging Ivanov, which he hopes will assure his tenure. As a premise for a novel, this sounds deadly, but ”Inventing Ivanov” is anything but your average academic novel.
In the first place, Ross is much more interested in stealing away Ivanov`s white-haired wife, Natasha, than in exposing the truths about Ivanov`s life. Ross is a myopic little snit who is completely wrapped up in his dull fantasies about lecture-circuit fame and Slavic sex. By strong contrast, Ivanov is an imposing God-like figure who dominates everyone`s thoughts.
As Ross goes about his machinations in the lifeless atmosphere of present-day Los Angeles, Ivanov tells his own story to the reader in a series of contrapuntal chapters that take the reader from one remote locale and time to another. Almost every chapter of Ivanov`s story deals with his sexual exploits. We see him at his parents` dacha involved in some adolescent necking with a neighbor girl the night before the lid blows off Czarist Russia. Next we see him making love on an Oxford University rowing team`s barge. After that, it`s off to Berlin, where Ivan has another affair.
If, in synopsis, all of this sounds wild, that`s not far off the mark. At no place in her narrative is Smoodin afraid to take risks or to show off her commanding sense of character and details and her wry sense of humor.
The Los Angeles that Alice Hoffman creates in ”Fortune`s Daughter” is just as exotic, in its own way, as Smoodin`s. In fact, Hoffman`s L.A. also takes on some of the mythic and magical proportions of Smoodin`s Moscow, Paris and Berlin.
Once again, this is the story of two people, told in juxtaposed chapters and moving between the present and past. But this time, it`s the story of two women: Rae, a young woman who`s pregnant and who has just left her boyfriend, and Lila, a fortune teller. The two women meet in a tearoom in the middle of what Hoffman refers to as the earthquake season, on a day that`s about 106 degrees. At first, Lila reads Rae`s tea leaves and sees that her child is going to be born dead. After that, she doesn`t want to have anything to do with Rae. But as the novel progresses, Rae pushes herself into Lila`s life.
One thing that`s especially appealing about this book is that Rae and Lila don`t form a lifelong bond, as might be expected. Indeed, Lila would like to have nothing to do with Rae. The two women do learn about themselves through each other–not because of any mutual affection but merely because of their proximity.
In a broad sense, this is a feminist novel, though one without any strident political overtones. Instead, it is an elegant and evocative novel that conjures up a kind of modern-day female mythology.
Tom De Haven`s ”Funny Papers” is a nice idea and has a nostalgic, enchanted feel to it in many places, but it isn`t ultimately as successful as Smoodin`s or Hoffman`s novels. Set in turn-of-the-centurty New York, the book follows the career of a young newspaper artist named Georgie Wreckage and his shift from drawing cartoons for the funny pages. His cartoon depicts a bald boy named Pinfold who walks around in a nightgown and white spats and has a talking dog named Fuzzy.
Georgie hits it big with his cartoon, and soon the toy manufacturers are making Pinfold dolls and Pinfold hats, which is great for Georgie, though it soon becomes a tremendous problem for the real little boy he has based his strip on. This kid`s name is also Pinfold, and he has a dog that possibly used to talk but doesn`t now. In any case, with the success of the cartoon based on him, Pinfold can`t go anywhere without seeing dozens of newsboys made up to look like him, and after a while he even gets a job as an imitation Pinfold selling Pinfold shoes.
Unfortunately, the book soon gets bogged down in its wackiness. There`s very little realistic grounding here, even though De Haven has done an admirable amount of research. Despite the turn-of-the-century feel, most of the characters have a cardboard flatness to them and just run around like giddy young kids who`ve been left untended by their parents too long.
Despite its title, ”The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer,” by Carol Hill, never quite gets off the ground. Here we deal with the adventures of Amanda Jaworski, a NASA astronaut who wears red-and-white shorts, blue boots, roller skates, travels through space and is torn between the love of two men, a test pilot named Bronco McCloud and a particle physics professor at UCLA named Donald Hotchkiss.
Unlike De Haven, Hill doesn`t even attempt to give her zany characters anything but names and functions. A sampling includes the fattest sheriff in the West, Elrod, and his friend, Rufus; a boy genius named Genius; a NASA chimpanzee named 342 who likes to steal cars and take joy rides; and Bronco McCloud, who has been affected to the very core by his love for Amanda.
The book reminds me of a college course I once took called ”Physics for Poets.” As a textbook, it works because it presents physics in an understandable light, but that`s not the job of a novel. Hill has crammed her book so full of research that one imagines her characters stumbling around blindly and spewing out information just from the sheer weight of what they`re carrying around. This accounts for an incredible amount of forced dialogue, such as when Hotchkiss asks Amanda, who has been hearing things at night,
”Are you trying to tell me you can hear anything on a fourteen-hundred-megahertz band? You know that`s the only radio band they think any kind of extraterrestrial life could contact us on.”
Overall, these four novels travel the whole spectrum in their abilities to bring the reader into several distinct magical worlds. Obviously, it`s not just research that convinces a reader that the writer knows what he or she is writing about, nor is it eccentricity alone that makes a character interesting or a situation funny. As both Smoodin and Hoffman successfully show, you can make your plots as bizarre and unlikely as you want as long as your essential loyalty remains with the people you`re writing about, rather than the concepts they represent.
