Reviews on The Review

Science and literature are both ways of describing the world. This makes the idea of Samantha Hunt’s novel about the scientist Nikola Tesla seem very natural. Or it should do. At its best, The Invention of Everything Else describes the world in such beautiful detail that it makes you want all fiction to contain an element of science. There are passages here that make you feel as though the world is almost unbearably wonderful. It is these that the book is worth reading for.

 

However, this is a novel shackled by reality. Hunt is only on her second book. And as such, she is still a little caught up in the novice writer’s justification that things should be believed because they ‘actually happened that way’. She even goes as far as to work recorded quotes from the real-life people featured in her book into the dialogue of their fictional counterparts.

 

Historically real statements and events are allowed to shape this story, rather than Hunt doing so herself. This makes it difficult to see Hunt’s objectives. Most modern readers have now become used to a postmodern, ever-questioning lack of dialectic. However, Hunt does not even do this. She highlights no specific problems regarding the possibility of knowing historical or scientific truth. She simply lays her interesting findings about Nikola Tesla on the page.

 

The format of this book suggests that it wants to be a historical novel. It claims authority from history with multiple layers of intertextuality and historical source-notes at its end. However, it fails to confront this, and makes no attempt to engage with history in any way. Rather, it seems to accept a very traditional view of history, and any questions regarding truth in the novel are aimed at the senile fabulations of old men. Both free electricity and time travel are tentatively posited as possible within the realm of this fictional world. The narrator doubts these old men who claim these scientific innovations to be true, and they are portrayed as unreliable characters. Therefore, the truth, and potential for knowledge, of science as well as history, is never really confronted.

 

The problem with this book is that it has just too many ideas. Each of them being quite interesting in its own right. Yet there is not a single strand that has enough focus to form the main thrust of the novel. There are too many stories that are merely hinted at here, and though they are intriguing, they only serve to distract the reader in the complicated context of the novel.

 

Hunt’s descriptions of the world are truly original and inspiring. That she succumbs to the pressure to wedge in a romance-plot and to draw the book out to 352 pages does not detract from that. Any problems the book has will surely be ironed out in Hunt’s future offerings. It can only be hoped that she will keep writing about science, keep forcing a cynical world to see how beautiful its surroundings are, and keep looking at the people and ideas that literature usually leaves untouched.