The Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt: 4.5 stars

The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt

Wow.

When I first heard about this book, I knew I had to get it. I mean, it’s Tesla, okay? That meets my requirements right there. But the reviews were so promising, and indeed I was so excited about it, that when it arrived in the mail, I daren’t read it, because my expectations were so high.

So it sat on my bookshelf from April 2009 until now. And yet I think that I could have opened it immediately and it would have fulfilled even the ridiculous obligations I had laid out for it then.

Nikola Tesla, Samuel Clemens, John Muir- together at a dinner party? Need there be more to keep my interest? How about a realistic sense of history, even in a fictionalized account? How about a style of writing that is at once straightforward, simple, elegant, and lyrical? Characters (besides the famous ones) that are well-developed and enchanting. A plot that continues to unfold, inevitably, even as you wish it stopped or transformed. Imaginative explorations that gave me chills.

And then THIS gem on page 240:

I didn’t care what they had said. I didn’t believe them. Who are government men to tell the truth? I held on to the file. I had sat very straight during the interview as though I was Bess the landlord’s daughter, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter with a shotgun tucked just below my rib cage, primed to go off if I exhaled too vigorously. I answered their questions, but there was very little to tell.

It made me think that, yes, this book reminded me of that poem (Alfred Noyes's The Highwayman), and that song (sung by Loreena McKennitt)- indeed, the feeling one gets from reading this book is not unlike that of listening to a ghost story.

And yet, as magical and otherworldly as it might seem at times, it is still grounded- any good story about Tesla would have to be both. He may be a ghost, but he’s just as real in death as he was fantastical in life.

“[T]here is only one world. This one. The dream is real. The ordinary is the wonderful. The wonderful is the ordinary.” (p. 84)

And, indeed, if you don't understand this, you will not understand the book. It will go right over your head.

I've found the right word, and the reason why I kept thinking about Marilynne Robinson's work in comparison (in addition to Kafka's [Amerika], which could almost *be* the story of Tesla, poor soul):

Ethereal

What was it to suddenly come awake? To suddenly fall asleep? Particularly while Freddie was standing there just beside him? What would she think of him if he were to stretch out underneath one of the pine massifs that are not really pine massifs but street lamps? To take off his shoes and dip his feet into a brook that might have trickled across the island of Manhattan two hundred years before but had since been staunched and subverted by culverts, bubbling up as a filthy puddle, a sparrow's oily bathtub? What was it to suddenly come awake? It was terrifying. Yes, he thought. I am terrified, but I don't want it to end. If time is so porous that a full-grown man can slip inside it while holding fast to the hand of his wife, what then can he rely on at all? The solidity of a hand? He doubted it. (pp. 102-3)

Oh, yes. Ethereal is the perfect word for this book.