MYSTERIES OF MOTION

A dense and florid pseudo-philosophical novel, poked into a comparatively neat and bleakly jarring sci-fi frame: four American neo-luminaries, one young stowaway, and a pregnant Iranian (along with some barely-glimpsed others) are encapsulated in a Star Trek-type space vehicle on its way to an American space station. Lift-off, however, will not occur for some time—not until after what seem like light years of background on the major passengers. There's industrialist Jack Mulenberg, for whom "this trip is transportation like any other. . . he expects to be delivered." Mulenberg desperately craves black journalist Veronica Oliphant, whose "ebony oval" of a head "contains a brain of worth. . . which still has its own purpose, undefined." And Veronica has been married (falsely, it seems) to passenger Wolf Lievering-Cohen—a "tortured archangel" who is treated to some of Calisher's wooziest prose: "His innocence. . . wasn't childish but desert dry, absolute. Fatality had picked him clean." There's also William Wert, an old-style diplomat married to two Iranian women, both named Soraya, one of whom is aboard. Plus: young "Mole" Perdue, whose father betrayed this mission, and whom Mole will betray in turn; and Tom Gilpin, a philosopher lobbying for "the people of earth." Calisher follows each of these people—in past and present—through whorls of obscuring, portentous, glutinous verbiage, strangling the life out of the major characters. The story-lines are only dimly visible: Veronica's travels and lovers, and a bomb-ticking parting from a half-brother; Wert's acquisition of his wives, a legacy from an ancient Iranian potentate; Gilpin's paddling through vast seas of thought; an assassination and diplomatic palaver. Only the spaceship comes intermittently alive here—a scramble of missed signals, a surreal telecast of chatting anchormen from Earth, a cornucopia of eerie vistas and grimly humorous gadgetry. The rest, unfortunately is, like Calisher's other recent fiction, a pretentious morass of talking heads and overbearing prose.