Huge, resonant, bitingly funny, it is at once a stylish political thriller, a high-voltage romance, and an electrifying historical meditation. 
 
It opens in Los Angeles, in our own time, and we immediately recognize everything we see and hear: the freeways are jammed, the fires in the canyons quick and obliterating, the music and voices on the radios familiar; movie deals are cut over rich breakfasts, sunglasses are an obligatory accessory, and somewhere on another continent, behind locked doors in clandestine locations, the fate of the world is being decided by graying men.
 
Obfuscation. Business as usual.
 
Except for one thing: one simple historical shift, one detail deleted from the archives of humanity by which Traffic and Laughter simply - but to stunning effect - reinvents the world. Which world, for the moment, has at its center a group of brilliant and attractive men and women, all of them, to varying degrees, public figures: a popular L.A. disc jockey, the best special effects man in the movie industry, an American statesman in the twilight of his career and a German on the threshold of his, and the South Africans - one a black hero in exile, another a TV star, still others the members of an interracial , politicized rock group. These lives, until now haphazardly connected, have begun at once, and with stubborn, often bewildering intensity, to intertwine. 
 
Traffic and Laughter is a novelk of romantic obsession, domestic rearrangement, and diplomatic intrigue, of image manipulation, moviemaking, and apocalypse.