[In the following review, See offers a tempered assessment of In the Palace of the Movie King, noting a lack of plot or progression in the book.]

Reading In the Palace of the Movie King is like doggedly climbing an escalator that keeps going down. There’s no forward movement, no plot, and since Hortense Calisher is such an accomplished novelist, with such a long and distinguished career, you have to assume that’s her choice: She’s through with plot or straightforward story. She’s doing something else, and if you can’t get it, that’s your problem, not hers.

This novel is set in Albania, Hollywood and New York City. The people who wrote the press materials here must have been more than usually at sea about this material: They describe the hero, a filmmaker named Gonchev, as “a famous Bergman-like film director,” when actually Gonchev hangs out in Albania, making—if I read correctly—actorless silent films about cities. The “cities” are nothing more than movie sets, since Gonchev can’t leave Albania. He’s built those sets at a place he fancifully calls Elsinore. Calisher seems to think that a collection of artificial cities is something special, artistically speaking, but how Elsinore is different from the back lot at Universal, I really can’t say.

Gonchev, an itinerant emigre, was born in Russia, escaped with his parents to Harbin and then touched down in Kyoto. Fine, but then he chooses of his own free will to live with his wife, Vuksica, and to raise their children, Laura and Klement, in Albania: Why? Presumably by now he’s famous—and of all the arts, film depends on distribution—and yet he chooses to live in this cranky, closed-off country. But sometimes reading a novel is like dancing with a difficult partner. The author wants a world where everyone smuggles and everyone spies, and the whole ambiance of “Europe” is everywhere, in hand-washed linens and little country houses and outdoor ovens, so if she wants Albania, she can have it. Why be picky?

The press materials then state that “an enthusiastic band of would-be producers invites him to America to discuss a possible project—his life story on film.” To my knowledge, that never happens. His wife arranges to have Gonchev abducted to Paris, but the arrangements get mixed up, so he lands in America. The filmmaker has gotten a concussion during his kidnapping, so all he can speak is Japanese. This means he requires a beautiful Asian translator, named Roko, who soon becomes his mistress.

Gonchev is billed as a “dissident,” and he’s aware of the irony. He doesn’t seem to be dissenting from anything much and was happy enough in Albania. However, he’s sent out by a U.S. agency to pontificate about world events, and the novel jogs on for a long time in this venue, sometimes in middle America, sometimes in New York.

The author seems preoccupied with matters of language and translation: In a motel in “Ohio—or is it Illinois?” Gonchev muses, “One slept without a pajama top in this warm cage of a room that comes to meet one no matter how many miles on, in faithful rendezvous.” Later, when Gonchev makes it to the California coast—either La Jolla or Laguna—he meets a girl, “an angular woman in high-heeled red shoes not suited to the territory, sporting a long bag of frizzed hair that must endear her to the rock musicians whose favorite video-aide Malkoff had told him she is—and wearing the sullen silence that so often enfolds the female photographer.” Is this English or not? Later on, still on the coast, Gonchev thinks: “Those imposed in the Sunbelt are like everything there—geared to light and air, and to the body’s competence in sport-space.”

Mighty fancy, but what does it mean? By this time, the reader, who has accepted Albania and spies and amnesia that lets Gonchev speak only in Japanese and digressions of every stamp, has been treated to a California earthquake where the earth turns fiery hot and yellow, and Malkoff has disappeared into a crevasse. Also, Gonchev and his companions have been forbidden to leave their cars: California Civil Defense patrols, seen here as analogous to their Albanian counterparts, won’t let them walk. (Since Californians are encouraged to keep walking shoes in their cars in the event of an earthquake, this long passage makes you rethink Calisher’s vision of Albania.)

The reader could ask, with some good reason: What’s the story here? Is there a plot at all? Why is a silent-filmmaker from Albania world-famous? Why does so much of this novel read as though it’s been translated from Albanian or Inuit? How can a character disappear into an earthquake crevasse and the other characters just keep ruminating?

But there is a final, telling piece of public relations copy here. This novel is described as “a masterwork … by one of America’s most revered serious novelists.” This may be the literary equivalent of the initials C.S. (con safos!), cryptic West Coast Chicano slang that you sometimes see sprayed next to graffiti. Keep your hands off this! Approach with caution. Give this novel the benefit of every doubt. Just keep walking up that down escalator. You’ll get to the top and be a better person for it. Maybe.