The Same River Twice

March 1, 2010
A promising plot involving Russian contraband propels this Parisian thriller, but Mooney (Traffic and Laughter
) fails to create engaging characters, and his overworked prose doesn't help matters much. Max Colby, who judges himself to be quite possibly “the most inventive and daring filmmaker of his time,” struggles with creative challenges and with his adventurous wife, Odile, who is having an affair with Turner, an art dealer who has crossed a ruthless Russian mobster and is handling the sale of a small collection of smuggled Russian folk art. Lengthy descriptions of Max's cinematic travails and random filmic insights take up swaths of the book, either supplanting the action or bizarrely coexisting with implausible developments (a pivotal murder is especially hard to believe). Other glitches—wooden dialogue, a far-fetched denouement—interfere with an occasionally savory if predictable yarn.

Starred review from April 15, 2010
Mooney (Easy Travel to Other Planets, 1981) returns with a rich, multilayered, powerfully unsettling novel.

The author's experience as senior editor at Art in America and teacher of a graduate seminar at Yale University School of Art informs this novel's thematic exploration of the interrelationship between art and commerce. It succeeds on a number of different levels: as a page-turning mystery in which conceptual art meets the scientific vanguard of stem-cell research and as a meditation on the trusts and betrayals of marriage, on truth and illusion and the relation of each to artistic creativity. A French designer named Odile finds herself paired with a stranger by an art dealer who has hired them to smuggle communist flags from Russia, with plans to market them in Paris as objects of art. The book barely touches on"the political ironies of selling communist artifacts in a venue so aggressively market oriented," though the collapse of the Soviet Union has significant implications for the plot. Odile's American husband, a highly-regarded avant-garde film director, also finds himself caught in a bit of intrigue, as copies of one of his movies surface with an alternative ending he never shot. After Odile's smuggling partner disappears, she is threatened by Russians who suspect levels of conspiracy to which Odile has been oblivious. As allegiances shift and Max's new movie further blurs distinctions between life and art, Max discovers that his own impressions have become"like shards of a broken mirror, each reflecting one or two of the others but refusing to come together into a whole." But as this literary artist creates art about art, manipulating characters he has created who are manipulating other characters he has created, the whole comes together in a morally ambiguous manner that seems equally surprising, disturbing and inevitable.

"Paris is a small place," says more than one character, as the reader discovers just how small the city—and the artistic community and the world of international crime—can be.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2010
What begins as simply a way to pass some time while husband Max is out of the country soon turns into something altogether different for Odile, a French clothing designer, in this tour de force of a novel set in the 1990s. Contracted to more or less smuggle some Soviet-era flags out of Russia, Odile is successful in her mission until Thierry Colin, her companion, disappears as they are about to cross the border back to the West. Then, shortly after returning, her Paris apartment is ransackedwith nothing apparently stolen. Meanwhile, Max, an American art house filmmaker in the midst of an aesthetic crisis, discovers that one of his films is being sold on DVD with an altered ending and sets about trying to discover who's responsible. Their differing dilemmas lead in the same directiontoward the Russian mafia. VERDICT A taut and lively literary thriller that mingles the worlds of Paris and New York art collectors and filmmakers with a seamy and violent criminal underworld as it explores the nature of art, fate, and inevitability. Recommended.Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2010
Because Odile and Max, who live in Paris, are always short on money (shes a clothing designer; hes a filmmaker), she agrees to smuggle May Day flags out of Russia for art dealer Turner. Shes quite satisfied at the prospect of making a tidy sum until her fellow courier disappears, her apartment is ransacked, and her friends houseboat is firebombed. Meanwhile, Odiles husband discovers that someone is distributing videos of his first film with an altered ending. Odile is not entirely honest with her husband about her shady endeavors, first because she wants to protect him, and then, when she becomes increasingly attracted to Turner, because she wants to deceive him. But as the couple soon discovers, secrets can kill, especially when the Russian Mob is involved. Cult author Mooney (Singing into the Piano, 1998) is an acquired taste because of his intensely cerebral approach to philosophical questions. Here he grapples with the value of art and the meaning of love, but he sets those questions in a Paris rendered with a lingering, loving attention to detail and populated by quirky hipsters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)