Singing the body electric

HEAD FOR THE BOARDER Hunt visited the guest room once occupied by her eccentric protagonist.

Photograph: Nina Subin

When the seed for what would become Samantha Hunt’s second novel was planted, it was, like many pivotal moments in life, the result of a terrific mix-up. “I was at an art show in Purchase, New York, and there was a piece, I can’t even remember the artist, about Alexander Volta and James Joyce’s Cinema Volta,” she says. “So I made a note to look up Volta, and somewhere in my brain during the train ride home, I replaced Volta with Tesla. It probably happened—and this is so depressing—because of that rock & roll band Tesla.”

Four years of research and writing later, Hunt produced The Invention of Everything Else, a galloping tour of early-1940s Manhattan starring Croatian-born scientist Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) along with several characters of the author’s own creation. Apart from the eccentric Tesla, the book centers on Louisa Newell, a young chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker (where Tesla resided), and the odd, charmed intersection of their disparate lives. Plotwise, the novel variously involves homing pigeons, a time machine, government spooks, Mark Twain, and a sweet love story about Louisa and a dashing mechanic named Arthur Vaughn. Along the ride, Hunt dusts off and polishes not only Tesla’s legacy, but that of the city itself: Emptied of BlackBerries, Pinkberries, blog gossip and tapas bars, Manhattan’s catacombs and corridors seem not only becalmed, but almost gothic.

Hunt’s extensive research into Tesla and the New York he inhabited pays off in stunning period details; she nails the voice of the radio serials of the era, and excavates arcana such as the hotel’s dinner menu (“mousse of capon with sauce supreme”!) to make a novel that feels more like a suspension in bygone time than a clever re-creation of it.

“I feel lucky because New York is probably the best-archived place of any city in the country,” says Hunt, 36, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter. “The thing that’s so great about living in the city while I was writing the book was that I could just go to the Hotel New Yorker and it was like, ‘Here I am, right where Tesla died!’ It’s like when you walk in the Roman Forum and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is where Caesar was murdered, I’ll sit down and take a rest here.’ ”

The Hotel New Yorker is a character in its own right, a mammoth, self-sustaining ecosystem within the city where much of the drama unfolds. To unearth the establishment’s history, Hunt worked with Joe Kinney, an archivist at the hotel, combing through piles of documents detailing its operation during that era. “Tesla spent the last ten years of his life there, so I went to see his room, which is still a regular guest room—like something you’d find at the Ramada,” Hunt says. “There’s no acknowledgment of him there yet, but I think people are starting to realize his importance through the number of visitors, especially Serbians and Croatians. Tesla is taught in schools in those countries and he’s a great hero there, but for some reason we choose to ignore him.”

Which gets to a larger point the book raises: How did Tesla—the inventor of technology that became the basis of wireless communication, radio, X-ray and radar—become an obscure figure? Maybe it’s because at heart, as Hunt points out in her novel, he shied away from human interaction, and his inability to self-promote meant that his work was often claimed by lesser scientific minds. And though he lived here from his twenties until his death at 86, New Yorkers have never really identified Tesla as one of their own. After he died, his ashes were sent to Serbia.

Certain details tempt us to see Tesla as a tragic figure: He never married (“He said at one point that writers and artists can have wives, but inventors shouldn’t,” Hunt notes), and when he died alone in the hotel, his body wasn’t discovered for days. But The Invention of Everything Else doesn’t linger over the melancholy notes struck at the end of his life. In Hunt’s version of the story, Tesla is a quiet triumph.

The Invention of Everything Else (Houghton Mifflin, $24) is out now. Hunt reads Thu 7.