Samantha Hunt
Issue #34
The author goes searching for inventor Nikola Tesla and finds a story about the endless possibilities of science in The Invention of Everything Else. She also expounds on the New Yorker Hotel, living in small towns, and “you know, the wonders of
By Ling Ma
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 2:49pm
If you ever go looking for Tesla’s ghost, the New Yorker Hotel — where the inventor died impoverished and alone in 1943 — seems an unlikely place nowadays to rub elbows with phantoms or any mark of the past for that matter. The hotel is now a slightly drab tourist Ramada sandwiched among 99-cent trinket shops and fashion discount stores that riddle this particular part of Midtown Manhattan.
But Samantha Hunt has insisted on making this trek to the formerly grand hotel for ages, if not in search of Tesla’s ghost, then in pursuit of something more elusive: a way of communing with history. Her second novel, The Invention of Everything Else, spans the last days of Tesla’s life at the hotel and his friendship with a chambermaid named Louisa. The story tells of the endless possibilities of invention and science, suggestive of an aspiration toward the transcendental.
Hunt first became interested in Tesla when, years ago, she confused his name with another inventor, Alessandro Volta, whose work she glimpsed at a museum exhibit. Somewhere between the museum and Hunt’s computer, she got the names shuffled, and instead of looking up Volta, Hunt looked up Tesla. “So his name was in my brain somehow — I don’t know why, but it was there,” Hunt says. “When I started to read about all that he was responsible for: radio, radar, electricity as we know it today [Tesla invented the polyphase AC motor that phased out Thomas Edison’s DC model] … I knew instantly I wanted to write about him.”
A novel about a scientist and inventor is thematic with Hunt’s earlier work. In a way, it seems like a natural extension of Manual or the Lives of Famous Men, Hunt’s collection of fictitious profiles about public male figures. The profiles in Manual range from Senator John Glenn to Buzz Aldrin to Stephen Hawking, whose story she coyly describes as “basically a love letter to him from some woman, dreaming about him and, you know, the wonders of Stephen Hawking.”
The collection came about after finishing her first novel, The Seas (2005), a strange siren song of a story about a young woman who may or may not be a mermaid. Hunt wanted to write about something much less emotionally personal, so she started thinking about people she considered to be as opposite from her as possible — namely, powerful male public figures. “I was, what, 25 years old when I started writing them,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I had much power in the world.”
There’s this lovely line in The Seas that goes, “The color blue fills the entire mirror, and watching it I think that is how a small northern town in America works. It enlists one beautiful thing like the ocean or the mountains or the snow to keep people stuck and stagnant and staring out to sea forever.” Hunt was born in upstate New York about an hour and half from the city and grew up in an old house built before the Revolutionary War. At 17, she moved to a small Vermont town and lived there for 10 years, working as a graphic designer at a local alternative weekly paper she and her friends started. After the end of a long-term relationship, she finally moved to the city.
“I just found that it required superhuman strength to leave a small town. Vermont was gorgeous. It was so beautiful,” she reminisces, but also counters, “Living in a small town is really wonderful and really destructive to a young person’s identity. It’s so hard to know who you are when everybody else in town knows exactly who you are and is constantly defining you by who you’ve been your whole entire life.”
Hunt, who currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and newborn daughter, found New York City to be an easy place to set a historical novel in. “Everything is archived in this city, every single thing,” she says. From our booth in the Tick Tock Diner, she gives me a tour of the outdated underground areas of the hotel now closed off to the public. “They have these laundry machines down there which I’ve seen operate, where whole sheets go through the wash untouched by human hands and gets pressed and dried,” she marvels. “Right underneath us is the old Manufacturer’s Trust bank vault. The bank is no longer open, but you probably saw those big brass doors on the outside over there that say ‘Manufacturer’s Trust’ — they’re beautiful.”
On a late Saturday morning in October, Hunt’s excitement is still palpable at the idea that there are layers of history right underneath us — underground vessels that are now dark, silent, closed off, and at this point, only accessible by the reaches of imagination.
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