Rousseau's Ghost

Synthesizing echoes of Poe and state-of-the-art Internet issues, an unlikely plot achieves a tone of lucid, camp humanity in the fiction debut of political scientist Ball (Reappraising Political Theory). New York lawyer Jack Davis reaches Paris to find his old friend, Princeton scholar Ted Porter, dead as a result of a computer short-circuit. Knowing his friend's contempt for computers, Jack smells a rat. Teaming up with Ted's research assistant, Danielle Dupin, Jack airs his suspicions to old Christ Church Oxford tutor Sir Jeremiah Altmann. The octogenarian is equally suspicious and decodes Ted's cryptic note ""Inst pol?!?!"" as a reference to 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Institutions Politiques, a larger work, rumored to have been destroyed, from which Rousseau extracted only Le Contrat Social. It seems Ted's conviction that Institutions had survived may have enraged the mysterious Societe de Jean-Jacques, which is devoted to controlling the master's legacy. After a philosophical lull, the plot accelerates to a cinematic action scene, the climax of the struggle to define intellectual property. Although parts are contrived (Danielle is too much the middle-aged man's erotic fantasy, the francophobia and anglophilia naive, and the supposedly brilliant narrator's bewilderment comprehensible only as a ruse), the novel has a winning integrity. (Oct.)