PEAFU K. BELL
481
kitchen sink.
The time is the present, but reality and history as we know them
have been artfully skewed: the "fission bomb," as Mooney calls it, has just
been perfected, and high-level diplomats are conferring secretly in France
about a test ban for this lethally hot property.
In
the course of these
"simple" negotiations some of the diplomats hope
to
abolish racial
oppression in Africa and bring peace to the world as well. Meanwhile, in
Los Angeles, the popular disc jockey Sylvia Walters (symbolic relative of
Barbara? Mooney is fond of such allusive twinings), daughter of the
American diplomat at the negotiating table, is trying to save what she
can from her house, which is about to be consumed by the brush fires
devastating the canyon. However, she also interrupts her packing long
enough for some torrid sex with a special-effects expert she barely knows.
Cut to the city center (if Los Angeles
has
a center), where Sylvia meets a
black actress from South Africa whose diplomat father is also involved in
the bomb conference, and who draws Sylvia into a scheme for smuggling
arms to the rebels in her country.
The cinematic action, occasionally written in scenario form, whirls
from Los Angeles to Paris to Johannesburg to Cape Town, Mooney
nudging us along with a wagging finger of significance about the sinister,
undefinable, malevolent forces controlling the fate of everyone in this
unreal-but-familiar world. Since both history and culture seem to consist
mainly, for this thirty-nine-year-old novelist, of interchangeable facts and
notions, Mooney doesn 't hesitate
to
revise as he pleases: the main airport
of Paris is called "Henri Petain"; the Second World War ended with a
bloody invasion ofJapan by American forces; James Joyce wrote a sequel
to
Finnegans Wake
called
A Simple Tail;
and
Dr. Strange/ove
is a forgotten
documentary made by a mystery man who mayor may not be an agent
of the C.I.A. The "jokes" proliferate, but the comedy falters as the
collage of ambiguous scenes becomes more tangled and confusing.
There is more than a pinch of Pynchon paranoia as the action races
to its fiery finale . But for all the games he loves to play with history,
Mooney doesn't have Pynchon's manic, inventive vitality. Though he
struggles to convey some profound insight into our perilous times, it
consists only of such throwaway obfuscation as, "A woman laughing is
the sound of history." Both intellectually and emotionally,
Traffic and
Laughter
is too meretricious to be taken seriously. The plot is a maze
without an exit, and the characters have the depth of a movie poster. To
echo the immortal words of Ben Hecht, this novel is as phony as a glass
eye. As for the mystifying title, Mooney, when prodded by an inter–
viewer, refused to divulge what it means, only that "It's much too per–
sonal." That's one way of saying that the title, like the novel itself,
means less than meets the glass eye.
