New Vibes

By Paul Gray

EASY TRAVEL TO OTHER PLANETS by Ted Mooney Farrar, Straus & Giroux 278 pages; $11.95

Melissa is a marine biologist who has become sexually involved with a dolphin named Peter. Jeffrey, Melissa's human lover, has given up a promising career as an architect to teach fifth-graders in the New York City public school system; he thinks of his students as "a kind of early warning system for what's next in the world." Meanwhile, their friend Nicole feels glum over the prospect of another abortion, her sixth. She would like to have the baby and marry Diego, her Cuban lover, but doing so would cause her father to revoke the TWA pass that she uses to jet wherever her spirit moves her. Kirk, Jeffrey's twin brother, is taking parachute lessons in preparation for a photojournalistic assignment in Antarctica. The world, apparently, is ready to go to war over the natural resources under the South Pole.

If this does not sound like a recipe for trendy froth, then nothing can. But Author Ted Mooney adds some marijuana and gin, stirs and comes up with a substantial and moving first novel. For one thing, circumstantial whimsey is balanced against the pathos of characters trying to take their increasingly weird lives seriously. The air around them is "full of microwaves and jets." An apartment-house elevator contains a TV set; during a short ride up, the operator switches dials and treats his passengers to snippets of six old movies. Strange rituals proliferate; at airports, Mooney's people watch "metal detectors detect belt buckles and sets of keys on the persons of those who wished to fly somewhere." Things, Melissa decides, "were getting fast and odd."

Everyone struggles with the barrage of data that is modern life. Memory no longer seems able to file everything that the senses receive: "Sometimes the things Nikki saw on TV scared her, but a moment later she would forget about them." A new disease has begun to spread: Information Sickness, a kind of systems-overload characterized by "bleeding from the nose and ears, vomiting, deliriously disconnected speech, apparent disorientation, and the desire to touch everything." What with all the new vibes zinging through the air and the characters' craniums, a totally unprecedented emotion has also been reported. One student describes it: "It's like . . . I don't know, it's like being in a big crowd of people without the people. And you're all traveling somewhere at this incredible speed. But without the speed."

Although no one spells it out, this "new emotion" sounds like the tactile knowledge of what being alive now, thanks to science and space probes, means: sitting on a crowded planet that is moving very fast. In such a situation, Mooney's narrative suggests, everything that happens matters to everyone. But who can absorb, much less report, everything? The author sometimes reaches for cosmic consciousness and produces more comedy than insights: "On one of the fishing boats in the cove, a young down-islander discovered he had the wrong-size replacement batteries for his transistor and flung them angrily into the water; they sank forty feet and nearly hit a horseshoe crab." The narrative eye that watches this descent is necessarily distracted from all the other goings-on in the world. Mooney sees the problem and plays with it entertainingly. He also convincingly portrays a kind of ambitious anxiety that can erupt at any time in the here and now. At 29, he may well be an early warning system for what fiction in the '80s will be like. --By Paul Gray

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