The Diviners: A Novel

Let it be said that Moody never suffered for want of ambition. Ostensibly about the exploits of Vanessa "Minivan" Meandro;an overweight, pathologically cruel film-and-television producer, and her attempts to produce a 13-part miniseries about diviners;Moody's latest tome follows the tangentially connected stories of at least a dozen characters around the time of the 2000 election recount. Vanessa has no idea who authored the treatment or the novel the miniseries is supposedly based on; her accountant absconds with her production company's funds; her mother suffers delusions brought on by nonstop drinking. Meanwhile, a second-rate action film star is making demands, a television executive has a perversion for young, handicapped girls and a bike messenger may have murdered the gallery curator who touted his art as genius. The point: if Hollywood is a vision factory, these are its false diviners. They are all very well drawn (and the list goes on). But there's more: the portentous first chapter (which indulges in 11 pages of inert descriptions of the sun rising at every point across the globe), the book's end-of-Clinton-era setting and its relentless dissection of L.A.'s capitalist fantasy mentality reach toward summative critique of an era à la The Corrections. But Moody ends up having more to say about narcissism in its infinite vicissitudes than he does about its effects. Major ad/promo. (Sept.)
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As an artist, Rick Moody has always seemed torn between his avant-garde education -- his teachers included the experimental writers Angela Carter and John Hawkes -- and his more conventional subject matter. His first two novels, Garden State and The Ice Storm, were written with just enough ironic distance to show his postmodern colors, but they were about suburban anomie, one of the most common subjects in American fiction. They read the way Cheever and Updike might have if they'd studied Derrida and Foucault in college, but Moody's novels were tightly controlled to the point of repression, as if he were uncomfortable with his own subject matter. His next novel, however, Purple America, abandoned the irony and unleashed whatever rage Moody had been holding back. Still set in suburbia, it had more emotional and intellectual heft than the earlier books, and Moody, an almost freakishly gifted stylist, opened the novel with the full-blown modernist incantation of a heartbroken adult son bathing his crippled mother.

That was eight years ago, and in the meantime Moody has published only a book of short stories, a dazzling sci-fi novella called The Albertine Notes, and a rather convoluted memoir, The Black Veil, which attempted to conflate his life and family history with a general critique of white guilt for all sorts of political and cultural atrocities. The memoir provoked an infamous scorched-earth essay in the New Republic by the novelist Dale Peck, who declared that Moody was "the worst writer of his generation" and went on to accuse him of everything from comma splices to pointless virtuosity to slavish trendiness. "No doubt Moody is even now at work on a sprawling 'social novel' in the manner of The Corrections," sneered Peck.

At first glance, Moody's ambitious new satire, The Diviners, might look like the fulfillment of Peck's prediction. It's certainly sprawling, weighing in at more than 550 pages, with a huge cast of characters from various levels of society. Chief among them are Vanessa Meandro, a large woman (fond of Krispy Kremes) who owns an indie-film company in New York called Means of Production; Annabel Duffy, an aspiring black filmmaker who works for Vanessa; Thaddeus Griffin, a womanizing film star who is using the company to parlay his fame into artistic respectability; Annabel's brother Tyrone, a gifted but disturbed artist who works as a bicycle messenger; and the Reverend Duffy, a white liberal Congregationalist minister who is Annabel and Tyrone's adoptive father. There are also the wily president of a TV network and his sullen daughter; a Sikh cab driver with a graduate degree in American pop culture; Vanessa's alcoholic mother, who can "hear" cell-phone calls in her head; and a Latin American revolutionary named Eduardo who is really a guy named Sy from Rhode Island.

The thread that links all of them together is a proposed television miniseries about water dowsers, or diviners, that starts with the Mongol hordes, works its way through Gypsies and Mormons, and ends up in Las Vegas. This script, as it happens, doesn't actually exist. As a joke, Thaddeus and Annabel have concocted a fake summary of the project that goes awry because of a mistake by Tyrone's messenger service. As a result, a number of people who have no idea what they're bidding on, including Vanessa, begin to fight over the right to produce the series. And this fraud, which rather pointedly takes place during the post-election shenanigans of the 2000 presidential contest, begins to resonate in unpredictable ways.

The complicated plot, which has as many coincidences and missed connections as a Dickens novel, is not the point of The Diviners, however. A more conventional social novelist -- Tom Wolfe, say -- would have told the whole story in his own, Zola-lite version of the Voice of God, hitting all the plot points, but Moody stays true to his avant-garde roots and buries the plot. He tells the story as a series of mostly brilliant individual set-piece chapters, each one in a different style and each from the point of view of a different character, as if The Bonfire of the Vanities had been written by James Joyce. Thus we get the collapse of the Sikh cab driver's marriage from the point of view of his autistic son, the giddy diary entries of one of Means of Production's development girls as she seduces a hunky Mormon, and Tyrone's return to his father's home in the technical jargon of linguistics.

If you prefer a more straightforward narrative, this might not be the book for you, but if you like watching the smartest kid in the room do his stuff, The Diviners is like a Broadway musical filled with nothing but showstoppers, as Moody performs one bravura set piece after another.

If I wanted to be Peckish about it, I might point out that there's a certain fish-in-a-barrel quality about the targets of Moody's satire: egomaniacal movie stars, the ambitious development girls who sleep with them, funny foreigners who know American pop culture better than Americans, well-meaning and inept liberal clergymen. And if it's intended as a snapshot of The Way We Live Now (or at least The Way We Did, just before Sept. 11), it's a rather narrow slice of American life. But who cares, when the result is as flat-out entertaining as it is here? In my experience, the smartest kid in the room usually can't help himself, and more than that, he's usually the one who feels things more deeply than anybody else.

What saves Moody's virtuosity from pointlessness is his breathtaking empathy with each character, including and maybe even especially the most contemptible ones. Combine that with the fact that, for the first time (in one of his novels, anyway), Moody seems to be really having fun. And if you enjoy literary rivalries, there's even a purely gratuitous and entirely hilarious attack on Dale Peck, in a chapter devoted to a character called Randall Tork, "the greatest wine writer in history," in which Moody does a riotous and pitch-perfect imitation of Peck's slash-and-burn critical style.

Toward the end of the Civil War, the story goes, somebody complained to President Lincoln that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk. Lincoln reportedly said, "Find out what he drinks, and send a barrel to all my other generals." I'm not sure that The Diviners tells me anything I didn't already know about show business or that it really illuminates The Way We Live Now, but it sure is fun to read. If this is pointless virtuosity, then we should find out what Rick Moody's drinking, and let's all have a taste.

Reviewed by James Hynes
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The "almost freakishly gifted stylist" Rick Moody concocts his latest as if it were The Bonfire of the Vanities as written by James Joyce (or so says The Washington Post). Most critics (at least those on the coasts) agree that the author’s writerly gifts give new life to the age-old practice of Hollywood satire. As always, he does go way over the top (for example, the overlong prologue waxes poetic about the sun rising across the globe, and don’t we already know that the god of pop culture is a false god?), but most reviewers could forgive the lapses. More important, Moody seems to be having fun. And there’s something divine in that alone.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Moody's latest novel revolves around a proposed mini-series epic that follows generations of a tribe of diviners, from the conquests of the Mongols to the founding of Las Vegas. Unbeknown to the agents and studio executives scrambling for the rights, there's no script, only a synopsis concocted by an office assistant and her lover, a married action-movie star. Meanwhile, a producer's aging alcoholic mother disappears; an accountant embezzles thousands of dollars and goes on the lam; and a schizophrenic bike messenger is falsely accused of attempted murder. Moody's kinetic prose calls to mind Bruce Wagner's kaleidoscopic Hollywood novels, but it lacks Wagner's acerbity and airy humor. One major riff concerns a popular television show about a community of werewolves (and involves a wearisome recounting of camera angles). Moody's novel, like the high-production-value shows it refers to, has an earnest sententiousness that overshadows its well-crafted fluency.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

*Starred Review* In a dizzying, exhilarating comic narrative, Moody follows the doings of Move On Productions and their feverish attempts to launch the miniseries The Diviners, a multigenerational saga about dowsing. Moody introduces, with great affection, a large cast of characters, all of whom are players, whether high or low, in the entertainment industry. Among them, hard-charging Vanessa, head of the company, who, when not feeding her addiction to Krispy Kreme doughnuts, regularly directs scathing ridicule at her minions; a gentle Sikh cab driver with an advanced degree in comparative literature who is suddenly made head of "the theory and practice of TV"; and a bipolar bike messenger who is the only authentic artist of the bunch. Vanessa whips her staff into a frenzy while sidestepping all the usual problems--her embezzling accountant; her mother, who appears to be channeling cell-phone calls; and, oh yes, the script for the increasingly buzzworthy miniseries, which appears to be missing. The propulsive narrative is studded with a series of increasingly hysterical set pieces--an autistic child's most violent episodes are triggered by a certain plump talk-show host; a McDonald's promotion that will package plastic divining rods along with the hamburgers. Moody has an uncanny ability to mimic almost any form of language--script treatments, marketing taglines, Valley Girl speak--in the most hilarious fashion. Usually the purveyor of much darker fare, he seems to be having a blast with this wild and woolly take on our media-saturated culture, and so will his readers. Joanne Wilkinson
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