Big in Russia

MEETING AT A FAR MERIDIAN (360 pp.) -Mitchell Wilson-Doubleday ($4.50).

Three facts make this novel a publishing curiosity: it is the first book to appear simultaneously in the U.S. and the Soviet Union; it is written by the only American writer known to have collected sizable royalties from Moscow: its author, a bestseller in the millions in Russia, is ranked by Moscow side by side with Hemingway--but few U.S. readers have ever heard of him.

Some of the reasons for U.S. disinter est and Russian interest are clear in Wilson's latest novel. Written at too much length and with too little imagination, it intermingles scientific razzle-dazzle, political flimflam, and wishy-washy sex.

Uncosmic Rays. The book's hero, Nich olas Rennet, is a brilliant American physicist whose creative powers are fast shriveling in the spiritual fallout from The Bomb, which he helped build. Intellectually and emotionally paralyzed, he attends a scientific conference in Moscow, befriends a Russian physicist whose experiments parallel Rennet's but whose conclusions do not. Rennet finally straightens himself out in a cliffhanging denouement three miles up in the Caucasus, while trapped by an avalanche. Along the way, Rennet, whose productive barrenness is matched only by his reproductive fecundity, seduces his own secretary, one of his Russian colleague's assistants (with whom the Russian is secretly in love, naturally), and an American expatriate living in Moscow whom Rennet is about to marry at the book's less than cosmic finish. With the exception of several vague references to the peaceful universality of science, Far Meridian is nonideological.

Wilson has covered similar territory before: Live with Lightning (1949) was about an atomic physicist who quits big business for the academy, and My Brother, My Enemy (1952) renewed the conflict between hard cash and gentle idealism. Author Wilson, now 47, first turned to professional writing before World War II, while working for a doctorate in physics at Columbia University under famed Enrico Fermi. Days he measured the mes on; nights he ground out magazine stories and suspense novels (Footsteps Behind Her, Stalk the Hunter}. Finding his dou ble life profitable but pointless, Wilson ended both careers, later moved to Martha's Vineyard as a year-round resident to write "of serious things."

Piroshki & Klyukva. Wilson's ruble romance began in 1953, when he learned from travelers that Live with Lightning had been translated into Russian and was selling like piroshki. Although Russia is not a signer of the Universal Copyright Convention and ordinarily pirates foreign works without payment, Wilson wrote to Moscow and asked for royalties. He received no reply till two years later, when the Russians decided to serialize My Brother, and after a protracted exchange of cables deposited $6,000 in his U.S. bank account. Author Wilson has so far collected about $20,000, expects to make another $15,000 from Far Meridian.

To research the new novel, Wilson spent six months in the Soviet Union in 1958 as his own host in a $6-a-day, two-room suite at the Moskva Hotel. Before he left the U.S., Wilson studied Russian for five months and boned up on cosmic ray research at M.I.T. This summer he returned briefly to Russia, manuscript in hand, for translation and for checking against bloopers, or klynkva (literally "cranberries"). The Russians lionized him, put him on TV, pursued him in the streets for his autograph.

What do they see in his work? Replies an Intourist girl guide: "He tells me so much about America I never knew, and he makes scientists so human. They flirt and fall in and out of love, suffer when their love is unanswered and thrill when it is-just like the rest of us." The Soviet regime finds a more sophisticated satisfaction in Wilson's heroes. The editor of Foreign Literature, which is serializing Far Meridian, explains that the work is "a remarkable contribution to the cause of peace and coexistence," despite occasional "contradictions of Soviet reality." But Wilson insists that "the Soviet system is not my pitch, it's just a novel about creativity."

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