This is the first Rick Moody novel
I’ve read. Based on the praise for his other writing from the likes of Thomas
Pynchon I had high expectations. My expectations were not realized. There are
those who would say I should have been warned. Set in the last days of the
Clinton administration, and in the shadow of the gerrymandered 2001 US election
result, The Diviners reflects the
naïve belief that if it is possible to sustain a collective illusion, that
illusion is as a good a basis as any for living a life. That’s a good pretext
for a novel. However, the message of The
Diviners is obscured by clever prose, knowing allusions, and the sheer indulgence
of characters whose smug pretensions are allowed into the text with no
semblance of authorial responsibility. The
Diviners is a satire, but just who is satirizing who is unclear. The
characters speak in portentous sentences that could have been the product of a
graduate class in ‘new writing’, or they could be Moody’s, the author as victim
of his own parody.

The
Diviners charts the machinations of an independent film production company
Means of Production, whose manager, Vanessa Meandro is intent on producing an
epic television miniseries on the unlikely topic of the search for water.
‘Meandro’ evokes ‘meandering’, and that is certainly what the novel does, and
what Means of Production does in pursuing the creative and marketing
breakthrough that will rescue it from the threat of financial collapse. The
proposed miniseries is to be multigenterational, transhistorical, and the last
word in television entertainment. Although it is talked up prior to production,
it is highly unlikely to be produced at all, suggesting that subjects of
advertising are less important than the hype that surrounds them. Could it be
that Moody considers the ideas of his novel more important than the novel
itself? That Moody has no intention to write a novel, and that he merely wants
to expose the shallowness of the values of early 21^st century
America? If so, Moody has chosen a rather heavy-handed way to communicate his
message. The Diviners is almost 600
pages in length, with much of the content of marginal significance. Even the
intriguing and interesting episodes of back story, such as Vanessa’s mother’s
alcoholism and weird hallucinations are like false leads; tributaries that
trickle off to nowhere and disappear from sight.

The book begins with a chapter-long
evocation of Dickens, following the sun on its global circuit. Light upon
everything from stray dogs and the open sea, to the Himalayas and fugitive
barbers. There’s even light upon ‘the scars and striations of the ocean floor
marking the subduction of techtonic plates.’ Phew! You get the sense that Moody
will lose no opportunity to digress, and in considerable detail. Later on
there’s an exploration of the consciousness of a brick. Moody has no difficulty
outlining pages of background on characters, events, and history, and then
leaving it all behind when the focus of the novel shifts.

Vanessa Meandro is an overweight
binger on Krispy Kreme doughnuts. She is burdened with an alcoholic
troublemaking mother, whose colon disorder is described in more detail than you
want. Around Menadro, Moody gathers a diverse and bizarre ensemble of
characters. There is a Sikh taxi driver with visionary notions of the place of
television in American culture, Annabel Duffy, Meandro’s assistant and brother
of Tyrone, a mentally ill artist-cum-bicycle courier wrongly believed to have
assaulted another character, art enthusiast Samantha Lee, with a brick. There
is Thaddeus Griffin, a narcissistic B-Grade hero who is recognized wherever he
goes for his role in ‘Single Bullet Theory’, a movie event that is apparently
of some moment. The problem with the characters is that there are none we can
care about. We might feel for poor put-upon Annabel, for victimized Tyrone
(although probably not for Thaddeus Griffin). Both Vanessa and her mother are
credible characters, and Vanessa’s dilemma about whether to incarcerate her
mother in order to save her life is sympathetically evoked. But in the end all
the characters are subsumed by the reckless scheme of the novel, so that even,
for example, when Tyrone achieves a fleetingly observed understanding of sorts
with his mother there is simply too much going on for that event to assume any
significance. As with much of The
Diviners this may well be the point, that the relentless thing after thing
pace of modern America allows no opportunity to reflect, no chance to enjoy the
moment.

A plot summary of The Diviners is all but impossible.
There is plenty of action, and some of the events do link together in a way
that has consequences for the characters. But there is also plenty that
detracts from a coherent plot, and readers are left to make what they will of
it all. Much like the miniseries that Vanessa dreams of, The Diviners lurches from incident to incident, carving up its huge
canvas into rollicking episodes sustained by their own impetus, not by their
contribution to an overall narrative. Late in the novel readers get to see an
episode of the currently popular miniseries The
Werewolves of Fairfield County. This provides some ironically touching
moments, although the notion that the nation would be gripped by such a far
fetched story is an obvious reference to the entertainment industry’s
conviction that given enough promotion, people will watch anything.

This sprawling beast of a novel
threatens to consume everything that gets in its way: disciplined prose,
character development, plot, credibility. While it provides a sharp criticism
of pre-Bush America, it uses the superficial values of the time as a convenient
rationale for its own limited moral vision. The writing is too self consciously
clever for its own satirical purposes, although individual instances of it,
such as the writing of wine critic Randall Tork (the greatest wine writer in
history) would be funny if Moody had allowed the reader to think that someone
did actually take them seriously. But with so many pompous show offs and naïve
pretenders competing for attention there no one left to do the believing. For a
long book, The Diviners gallops along
at an admirable pace. Some will find its extravagances excusable in the name of
entertainment. Perhaps these readers are the real subject of Moody’s satire.

©
2006 Tony O’Brien

Tony O’Brien is a short story
writer, and lecturer in mental health nursing at the University of Auckland,
New Zealand: a.obrien@auckland.ac.nz

Categories: Fiction