When Tesla Ruled the Waves

A NOVEL OF ALMOST CHILDLIKE IMAGINATION CONJURES A TECHNICOLOR WORLD IN THE THRALL OF INVISIBLE FORCES AND SERENDIPITOUS ALLIANCES

The Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, the storied New Yorker Hotel, a young chambermaid and her night-watchman father, a faithful flock of pigeons, Thomas Edison, a time-traveling Mark Twain, a mysterious mechanic, and other vivid characters fill the history-rich pages of Samantha Hunt's terrific second novel, The Invention of Everything Else (Houghton Mifflin). In 1943, Tesla, the eccentric genie behind radio, radar, X-rays, the AC motor, and remote control, among other early-twentieth-century inventions, is nearing the end of his life in his lonesome aerie on the massive New Yorker's thirty-third floor. Louisa Dewell, a 24-year-old radio-drama- show junkie with a keen imagination, is assigned to clean his room. She and the hypersensitive scientist become fast friends, and, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, Dewell soon finds that life just gets curiouser and curiouser.

Laid out in chapters that alternate between the voices of Tesla and Dewell, the novel can be read as a sophisticated pastiche of science fiction, fantasy, melodrama, and historical anecdote. Muses Tesla on a child- hood event that intro- duced him to the secrets of the hidden physical world that he'd devote his life to sussing out: "I was a boy and there was a storm. The storm said something muffled.... The storm began to speak. You want to know what the storm said? Listen."

But the book also is a love story, or, more accurately, a novel about different kinds of love — a theme that loops through Hunt's well-researched tale, which explores the nature of discovery, communication, isolation, and unlikely friendships. We become witness to the highs and lows of Tesla's visionary, chaotic life, and we see how Dewell's own modest circumstances are infinitely enhanced by her charm and audacity, played out against the enlivened backdrop of mid- century New York City. It all adds up to a pre- cocious math of human marvel. — LISA SHEA Hunt