The Invention of Everything Else ~Samantha Hunt
–published 2008
–251 pages, Houghton Mifflin
–3.75/5 stars
Where does one begin to describe what results from Samantha Hunt’s sophomore novel? Though it feels like cheating I think the most efficient way to introduce you to Hunt’s creation is to show you exactly what inspired me to lay aside the books I was currently reading and begin this immediately upon arriving home with it from the bookstore:
A wondrous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker where Tesla lives out his last days
From the moment she first catches sight of the Hotel New Yorker’s most famous resident on New Year’s Day 1943, Louisa — obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the guests — is determined to befriend this strange man. As Louisa discovers their shared affinity for pigeons, she also begins to piece together Tesla’s extraordinary story of life as an immigrant, a genius, and a halfhearted capitalist. Meanwhile, Louisa—faced with her father’s imminent departure in a time machine to reunite with his late wife, and pleasantly unsettled by the arrival in her life of a mysterious mechanic (perhaps from the future) named Arthur — begins to suspect that she has understood something about the relationship of love and invention that Tesla, for all his brilliance, never did.
The Invention of Everything Else luminously resurrects one of the greatest scientists of all time, Nikola Tesla, while magically transporting us — Ã la Steven Millhauser and Michael Chabon — to an early twentieth-century New York City thrumming with energy, wonder, and possibility.
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