The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 74

1 0 Part Monday, October 5, 1981 Coo Aitfldce Slimes Book Review A Girl, a Dolphin, a Book to Flip Over vLjiliJi And The Critics Approve! not only speaks, but loves. Melissa loves? The city to which she returns is suffering an epidemic of "information victims are struck down with it on sidewalks and in cabs. They are nauseated, blood pours from their mouths and ears, and they become desperate to touch something anything. The new sickness is about the only thing in town there isn't adequate information about. Rooms as in our rooms have television sets going, radios murmuring, phones ringing.

And as Melissa returns, she finds that her opportunistic boss has managed to place an article about her and the dolphin in a publication like "People." Overnight the information on her is out; the phone won't stop, she has become one of a vast army of false-celebrities. And people try to live in this, to love, get along together, even though emotions are going through that same portentous, shaky metamorphosis: "Kirk himself has not experienced the new emotion, but he wanted very much to believe in its existence, in its newsness. It's like it's like being in a big crowd of people without the people. And you're all traveling somewhere at this incredible speed. But without the speed." Mooning for Melissa And in their cramped, cockroach-infested New York apartment which may, indeed, be a rocket ship to new thought, Melissa and Jeffrey attempt to live, to get on with love, friendship, the possibility of children, the inevitability of death, while outside the windows the moon sulks and issues an utterance: "Why am I not adored?" And down in the flooded house on the Jamaican shore, the dolphin moons for Melissa and tries to remember, from old dolphin sagas, what happened the last time a dolphin became enchanted by people of the land.

"Easy Travel to Other Planets" is an absolutely remarkable book. I think it is safe to say it is almost absolutely original; it takes materials we have with us every day and puts them together to make a totally strange but utterly recognizable world. The weird beauty of the dolphin, the ancient cliche of a hidden gun, the conventional wisdom about men who don't want to be tied down, and thereby risk the danger of losing all; the horrorsso familiar by now large (that war on TV) and small; the chemotherapy that makes the one you love suffer. The niggling, intimate, almost domestic torment of the bronchoscopy. Do these people make it? Can they love and stay alive? The last chapter is a lyric masterpiece, an example of the author himself moving "at a speed that seems, then and at all other moments, incredible." Jackie Collins Takes CHANCES Right To The Top! By CAROLYN SEE Easy Travel to Other PUati, by Ted Mooney (Farrar Straus Giroux.

($11.95) A young woman part of an ongoing experiment to find out whether dolphins have speech, thought, and if all that can be put to good human use spends several weeks at a flooded experimental house in Jamaica. The girl, Melissa, sleeps in a bed that hangs "suspended from the ceiling of the flooded house," while the dolphin, Peter, knocks restlessly about below. At night she lies awake, "listening to the pump's dull pulse as it circulated fresh sea water through the rooms, listening beyond that to the sea's slow suck. She gazes up through a skylight at meteor showers and thinks, "I am going to die from the strangeness of this. By morning I will be dead of the aloneness and the strangeness." Then, in the morning it looks as if everyone is back in the world of bright light, rationality and science.

Melissa and Peter play ball, he repeats what she tells him to; somewhere out in the larger world, there is an opportunistic academician drumming up funds for the project to continue. And the rest of the world is depressingly recognizable. Melissa has a "boy-friend" who teaches the fifth grade, and the weird little kids speak in a language understandable only to them. Melissa has a best girlfriend who can't "settle down," to put it mildly. She loves to jump on the nearest airplane to somewhere, and has had uncountable abortions.

The boyfriend, Jeffrey, has a twin brother, Kirk, who is into skydiving and kicks. And the girlfriend has a desperate Latin loser who is in love with her but can't stand the idea of kids. He drives a cab and plays in a band. The World Is Our Own In other words even though "Easy Travel" is placed in the close "future" the world is our own. Another war, this one in Antarctica, is tuning up to start: You can see it nightly on TV.

Will this be the one to end the world? As one character says, "You cannot rule out the possibility." And Melissa has a mother, wonderful woman, whose husband left her, long ago, for absolutely no reason anyone can figure out. The mother has one of those handsome, enigmatic, aging "boyfriends," and she is dying of lung cancer. The ordinary world. Except that on Page 13 of "Easy Travel," Peter, the dolphin, seduces Melissa. "For two seconds, she is fully underwater.

During that moment, she has the impreseion that she and Peter are moving at a speed so extreme that movement itself has subsided. When she lifts her head, spewing saltwater and gasping for air, the sensation vanishes at the same speed. Peter, his eyes half-closed, is ramming himself against her, and it comes to her that he does not know how or where to enter her. To say that Ted Mooney takes chances with his narrative style is certainly understatement, and the next hundred pages of "Easy Travel" take great determination to read, as you fight the increasing conviction that you've fallen into the hands of a young man driven mad by creative writing classes and lust. Except that he does it.

Moving, himself, with a speed so extreme that movement itself seems to have subsided, Mooney gives us a world as strange and dense and shuddery at the edges as that house under water. This is a world like a cell seen under a microscope; translucent and straining, about to divide, or to change. A dolphin sex-loaded, entertaining novel." -Publishers Weekly "What we have here is a woman who can as close to writing like Robbins as any author could -The State Columbia, South Carolina with animal vigor and sexuality, told with skill and sensitivity." -Burt Hirschfeld, author of Fire Island 4th Big Printing A Selection of The Doubleday Bookclub $14.95 At Your Book Store Now The Coast to Coast Bestseller Chances A Sure Thing! "It's a big, fat, sassy, sexy, action-filled story that embodies just about every ingredient for best-sellerdom glamor, sex, high fashion, a story that never pauses for it's the sort of novel you might expect of a Harold Robbins or Sidney -John Barkham Reviews Godfather goes to -Lee Leonard, "People Tonight" -Cable News Network all the goodies that make today's bestsellers." -Martin Burden, The New York Post out with a bang and never lets up." -Variety "Outrageously uninhibited. ferociously entertaining." -London Sunday Express packed with action, bedroom and otherwise." -Kirkus Reviews Woodbury U. Alumni Set Reunion Woodbury University's Alumni Assn.

will sponsor a homecoming open house on Oct. 16 and an alumni reunion dinner dance on Oct. 17. The open house will be held at the university, 1027 Wilshire Blvd. The reunion will take place at the Bilt-more Hotel, beginning with a reception at 7 p.m.

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