[In the following review, Piercy offers a positive assessment of Mysteries of Motion.]

Hortense Calisher’s ninth novel, Mysteries of Motion, takes large chances under which its structure and its prose at times crumple, but the vision is extraordinary enough for us to allow for its faults and still praise both the ambition and the work highly.

Mysteries of Motion belongs to the genre of “Ship of Fools” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” centering on a situation in which diverse characters with diverse histories are brought together. In this novel, the past occupies the bulk of the novel. However, if the form is venerable, the content is slightly in advance of 1984.

Five men and two women are launched from Cape Canaveral on the ship Citizen Courier, the first civilians scheduled to travel to a space platform to live. They believe themselves to he part of a group of civilians chosen to represent every interest and condition of the population of the United States, whom NASA is transporting into space as pioneers.

The novel, unfortunately, begins in the consciousness of Tom Gilpin, who is largely responsible for the pressure on the government to include people who are not astronauts, not perfect physical specimens, in the space program. He is a hero to youth, concerned about the future of mankind and has published for many years a magazine called The Sheet. He is also fuzzy-minded and given to rhetoric sometimes resonant but often flaccid. I find him the least successfully executed of the central characters, a better idea for a character than a realized full presence. Ironically for a populist, he is traveling with a select and elite company.

Veronica Oliphant, whose childhood was divided between New York and Barbados, is a writer for The Sheet. Black, beautiful and keenly intelligent, her ambitions have led her into the white world and into celebrity, but never into settling for anything. Her first serious affair was with Jacques Cohen-Lievering, her professor in college, a German-born and English-raised Jew. He is the most able in space, adept at adjusting to light or no gravity (gravity is an important metaphor in the novel). Veronica married Lievering in Cuba when she was very young. Immediately after the wedding, she fled, sensing he would persuade her she could not write. Veronica and her publisher Tom Gilpin are close friends but Tom has no sex life at all, whereas Veronica likes one-night stands.

One of these, an international businessman involved in the space program, is Mulenberg, the ordnance coordinator. He has pulled strings to arrange the companions he wants, primarily Veronica, with whose memory he is obsessed. He is a man for whom sexuality is central, who is energized and empowered, by his relationships and adventures with women.

Mulenberg was active in business in the Middle East, where he met the civilian administrator Wert, a former State Department man who has been assimilated by his sympathy for Iranians to the point that he married into a rich refugee family—not once but twice, both of his wives being named Soraya and both having been imprisoned together under the Ayatollah and both as close to each other as they are to him. Only one wife is along, however, and she is pregnant. Soraya’s is the only consciousness among the principal characters that we never enter, and I regretted that omission.

Wert’s is the longest tale, and while it is the most sensuous and richly presented segment of the novel, I have to judge that Calisher was seduced by the density of her own materials into overelaboration.

Another character, Mole, has taken the place of a friend because of his admiration for Tom Gilpin and because of his mistrust of his father, the admiral in charge of the project. Mole doubts the integrity of his father and suspects the flight may be programmed for failure. Lievering becomes his mentor on the space ship. Mole as a character is somewhat emblematical, but he has his quiddity, his flesh and his quirks.

This novel embodies a modern conceit, the novel of paranoia in which the worst imaginings invariably turn out to be less than adequate to the situation. All the travelers are rootless, mixed, refugee, emigrant. Mole is the youngest and the most mistrustful, but he is also Isaac, in thrall to Abraham’s drama, the pawn who can be sacrificed. Mysteries of Motion spins with its metaphors, glinting, winking. The ending is a masterpiece of ambiguity, although again Gilpin’s consciousness enshrouds us.

The interactions are subtle and engrossing. The physical sensations and deprivations of the space travelers are persuasively imagined, as are the increasing strains upon them as disasters press in. The relations between the civilian and the military, between science and government, between governmental power and the citizen, and the nature of our future are woven into the narrative. Calisher has taken an old form and revitalized it with good characters, high-tech gloss and disturbing contemporary themes.