Singing into the Piano

by Ted Mooney

“A fascinating work” ( Newsday ) of intellectual and erotic provocation in which a couple are drawn into the high-wire political campaign and marriage of a Mexican popular hero who’s running for his country’s presidency.

At a political fundraiser in New York, Andrew and Edith inaugurate their love affair with a brazen sexual spectacle. Watching them is the event’s speaker, Santiago Diaz, a Mexican popular hero running for his country’s presidency. He is aroused, disturbed, and intent on finding the couple whose erotic risk-taking parallels his own high-wire career.

Soon Andrew and Edith are drawn into Diaz’s life and the vortex of trans-American politics where plunder dictates policy, loyalty is devalued currency, and the future of nations is decided by talk-show appearances and terror.

Genres: Novels

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Like most fiction writers, I write to *discover* what I think, not to to report on what I already know.

Reviews

[Thomas Trang · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this one more than I actually did, especially after Easy Travel To Other Planets. Mooney has a witty urbane voice, very much in that Vintage Contemporaries 1980s/1990s style, and there are sections of this book that absolutely sing.

But it’s hard to get a hold on what the story is actually about. It reads like a NY novel of manners. There’s stuff about politics, NAFTA, globalisation and its discontents, sex, art…..all told in a sardonic and smart way. There’s a monkey let loose in a Manhattan apartment. Mooney is a great writer who is largely forgotten these days, coming out of the mid 1980s literary world alongside DeLillo and White Noise, and the two authors share some DNA and thematic concerns. In another timeline, I could imagine Ted Mooney operating on a similar stature.

However, this book is not the one to make the case for his unappreciated genius in tandem with Big Don D.

Even with cipher characters talking at each other in ideas, precocious kids, a wry worldview and slapstick comedy set pieces, it doesn’t entirely work. The ideas lack the clarity and precision, and the linguistic sharpness of even a mid tier DeLillo novel to overcome the weakness of plot here. Mooney only ever wrote 4 books, while DeLillo has written maybe a dozen since the mid 80s, one of which was Underworld ffs, so this was never going to be a fair fight.

When he marries his ideas and style with more narrative thrust as he does in The Same River Twice (intellectual thriller) or Easy Travel To Other Planets (techno dystopian sci-fi), Ted Mooney is as good as any other American novelist, but this book is probably too disjointed to convert the uninitiated.

Strictly for the Mooney completists. There are dozens of us, I’m sure. I may also be wrong.

[J. Alfont Chalmers · Rating 1 out of 5]

This novel has the most disgusting first chapter I have ever read. Since man is the animal who worships, if you don't worship God, you're going to end up worshipping something lower. In Mooney's case, much lower. He's one of those people who thinks any kind of sexual activity at all is inherently holy. The first chapter is about public masturbation.

[Paul (formerly known as Current) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I like this book, to me, it is a failed novel. It is written well. The characters are interesting. But it is entirely unconvincing to me how the pieces all fit together and how the characters interact.