I am a huge fan of Ted Mooney’s novel The Same River Twice. I bought it expecting a thriller, and it delivers a plot with gangsters, shootings, smugglers, torture scenes, and femmes fatales. But it is evidently constructed with much more care than a typical thriller is. The objects and events aren’t just there to advance the plot; rather, things refer to other things, whether as metaphors or as parts of a carefully constructed pattern. The narrative is often self-referential, commenting on thrillers, plotting, and narrative in general.

Two levels of suspense gradually build. One is typical of a mystery. Who are the bad guys? What do they want? What will happen to the characters we like? The second level of suspense is “meta.” What is the author doing with this book? What references (internal within the story or external to other works) does he expect us to recognize? Will he deliver a conventional conclusion or something different, such as a mise-en-abîme or a garden of forking paths? Am I missing some hidden key to the whole thing?

You know that something unusual is going on at the “meta” level when dialogue and narration that efficiently advance the plot are interrupted by very brief but vivid images. For example, in the midst of an exchange between two characters who are rapidly sharing important clues and piecing together the solution to a mystery, “a brace of teenage girls strode by three abreast, arms linked, eyes flashing, their futures not as distant as they imagined.” And then we go right back to the dialogue.

Images and representations are crucial to the story. One example is a film that a major character is shooting. He hasn’t decided whether it will be fiction or a documentary, let alone how it will end—and the characters are his friends. As a result, many of the events of the story are also on his film. Another image is an oil portrait of one protagonist, painted during several scenes by a second character at the behest of a third. (It turns out to be neither simply realistic nor abstract.) Still other important images or representations include pirated DVDs with their endings altered, smuggled Soviet-era posters now treated as chic art, episodes of déjà vu and dreams, and gene sequences and stem cells. The novel itself obviously belongs to the same category as the many genre-bending representations that appear in it.

I am not learned in film, but I think the novel contains frequent references to shots or dialogue from famous movies such as The Red Balloon, The Earrings of Madame de …, Reservoir Dogs, L’Atalante, and To Catch a Thief. One character thinks of The Maltese Falcon, “The world depicted in the film, for all its duplicity, innuendo, and fruitless striving, resembled the real world only in part.” The same could be said of The Same River Twice.

Here is a characteristic example of the care with which Mooney tells his story. I picked it almost at random, but it illustrates some of the central questions of the novel, especially whether representations mean anything:

While the American art dealer Turner cooks, eats, and bathes in his Paris apartment, his thoughts wander into memories and observations. Interspersed on these pages of vivid description are remarks by the narrator: “The story [that he recalls] had no moral, and Turner disliked being reminded of it.” “He was drawn to them [certain art objects] because they were beautiful, though that did not, he couldn’t help but note, make them indispensable. Far from it. They were beautiful, and that was all.” “He lit [candles] and saw his face illuminated from below like a face by Caravaggio, melodramatic, violent, blood-smart. It spooked him, but did not instruct. Maybe, he thought, he was not in a learning frame of mind.” These are not prominent phrases in the story, but they subtly reinforce a mood and pose a set of questions for the reader. And then suddenly, the plot takes a romantic and moving turn of enormous consequence to Turner.

If someone pitched The Same River Twice to a Hollywood studio, the producers would dismiss it as unbelievable. It’s not that the individual events and characters are implausible, but the overall structure (involving at least a dozen people in complex interplay) is so elaborately constructed that the artifice undermines the illusion. Since everyone is connected to everyone, the coincidences are too common to be believed. People arrive at offices or hide in closets just in time to overhear crucial information; one person’s brother’s girlfriend turns out to be another’s fiancée and is co-conspiring with a third.

But this artifice is the point. An author is manipulating the characters for reasons of his own—aesthetic and not moral reasons, like a gnostic god. As Turner thinks near the denouement, “He knew he was behaving like a character in a movie but so now was everyone else—all over the world, every waking hour, without even thinking about it.” The paranoid mood is worthy of Pynchon or even Borges, but Mooney is a much more tender writer than Borges. We care about the characters even as we enjoy the way he plays with them.

By the way, if there is a key to interpreting the novel, I wouldn’t give it away here.