Volume 46, Number 6 · April 8, 1999
It Happened One Night
By Edwin Frank
Singing into the Piano
by Ted Mooney
Vintage, 357 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Singing into the Piano is only the third novel that Ted Mooney has published in some twenty years, but it makes it clear that he is one of the most peculiar of contemporary American writers. Mooney's first book, Easy Travel to Other Planets, written when he was still in his twenties, told the story of a group of well-educated urban waifs, rather like those in the stories that Ann Beattie was then writing, though they seemed in their uncertainties not torpid or depressive, but active, intent on discovery, hopeful in spite of themselves. The whole book was oddly open and unpredictable. It began, characteristically, with a scene, much remarked at the time, in which a young woman researcher found herself seduced by a dolphin (Mooney's inspiration here was the LSD-fueled investigations into dolphin intelligence and communication of Dr. John Lilly). In describing this unlikely, and potentially grotesque, situation, Mooney deployed a casual, almost deadpan prose style to keep sentimentality at bay, and succeeded in conveying something of the strangeness, the unexpectedness and even inconceivability, of a direct encounter with another being.
Review, 2796 words
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