Hardly a 'Little Book,' with grand scope, imagination

By Selden Edwards

Dutton. 416 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Martha Woodall

Despite the title, Selden Edwards' debut novel,

The Little Book,

is anything but. It's a sprawling tour de force that encompasses time travel, baseball, rock-and-roll, the French resistance during World War II, and fin-de-siecle Vienna. This tale centers on the fantastical exploits of Frank Standish "Wheeler" Burden III. It also ponders the nature of family, the power of romantic love, and ties between fathers and sons.

Edwards is a former private-school headmaster, and according to his publisher, he began the novel in 1974 when he was teaching English. He spent more than three decades laboring over

The Little Book

, and the result is a singular novel that mesmerizes through the sheer, intoxicating power of its imagination. With his storytelling skills, Edwards manages to charm readers into casting aside their sense of disbelief on the first page.

"This is the story of how, through a dislocation in time, my son, Frank Standish Burden III, the famous American rock-and-roll star of the 1970s, found himself in Vienna in the fall of 1897," Flora Zimmerman Burden offers in her purported 2005 introduction. "It is a complicated story, full of extraordinary characters and wild improbabilities. Rather than dwell on those improbabilities or the parts that require more thought and explanation, I will simply tell you what I know exactly as I know it and let you sort out the pieces for yourself. . . . "

The reader becomes a collaborator, plunging headlong into a narrative in which Wheeler finds himself suddenly transported from 1988 San Francisco to Vienna as it was 50 years before his birth.

After stealing suitable clothing from an unpleasant young American he finds checking in at a nearby hotel, Wheeler acclimates himself to the new surroundings with surprising ease. Thanks to his boarding-school history teacher, Arnauld "the Haze" Esterhazy - whose papers Wheeler edits for a best-selling book - Wheeler is something of an expert on Viennese life, language, culture and politics. He also subscribes to his mentor's belief that the seeds of the 20th century - both the advances and the horrors - were sown in Vienna's golden age: " 'It was a time of delusive splendor,' the Haze would say alluringly, 'a whole glorious way of life teetering on the edge of the abyss. . . . ' 'If you understand fin-de-siecle Vienna,' he drummed into three generations, 'you understand modern history.' "

Wheeler insinuates himself into a new life in this strangely familiar city and finds a spot in the midst of the young intelligentsia who congregate at cafes to sip sweetened coffee and debate.

As E.L. Doctorow did with his 1975 novel,

Ragtime

, Edwards has Wheeler and his other fictional characters brush up against actual historical figures, including Winston Churchill, Gustav Mahler and Mark Twain. The narrative loops back and forth between late-20th-century America and turn-of-the-century Austria, and Wheeler manages to encounter not only Buddy Holly but also Sigmund Freud and a 10-year-old Hitler.

With Wheeler's 20th-century knowledge and memories intact, when he and Dilly, a fellow time-traveler, go to Hitler's home in Lambach to find the boy, they must contemplate what

Star Trek

fans will recognize as "the temporal prime directive," which prohibits time travelers from interfering to alter history's time line.

Yet when Edwards begins to fill in the individual circumstances of Wheeler's and Dilly's trips through time, it becomes clear he is less interested in science fiction than in metaphysics.

It's difficult to categorize

The Little Book;

it's harder to put it down. Edwards has written a sumptuous novel that was worth the wait.