In these short stories, Moody experiments. There’s a sense of playfulness here, but it’s serious too. Many of the stories are challenging to read, and some are self-consciously intellectual. For instance, "Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal," is one seventeen-page long sentence. It starts with, "Arguing about Lacan’s late seminars…" and ends with "I climbed down off the table and began straightening things up." It’s a monologue of an intensity comparable to Samuel Beckett’s Not I but the speaker is talking about her troubled relationship with her boyfriend and their debates about French feminist psychoanalytic theory. Like Beckett, Moody’s stories combine despair and absurdity with a sly and sometimes bawdy sense of humor.

How much you like each story will depend largely on to what extent you understand the obscure references he often relies on. I didn’t much enjoy "Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13," because I felt that most of the cleverness was passing me by. I felt that understanding "Wilkie Fahnstock, The Boxed Set" reflected my superior knowledge of obscure rock bands: each page here is divided into two columns, with the track listing of ten cassettes on the right and notes on the left. Since I’m know who The Proclaimers, The Silos, Half Japanese, Slint, Fly Ashtray and Aphex Twin are, I pretty much knew what was going on, although I may have to look up the obscure music on Cassette 10: who are "U. Srinivas," "David Lang," and "Carl Stone"?

Of course too much cleverness can easily be tiresome, and it needs to be balanced with some emotional home truths. His narrators, at least for the stories told in the first person, are unhappy, solitary people, and they can take a little while to reveal the sources or extent of their misery. But for the most part Moody gets to the point eventually, and there’s a great deal of insight in the ways he gets there. It’s the passages where Moody captures the quality of everyday experience of self-deception, resentment and brooding that grab you by the scruff of the neck and you want to read it out loud to your loved ones and tell them, this is what it’s like.

To my mind, it is the first story in this collection, "The Mansion on the Hill," that really succeeds in packing a punch. A man tells his story to his dead sister, giving her the details of what he has been doing since she crashed his car on the way to her wedding rehearsal dinner. Since the accident, his life hadn’t been going too well, but he manages to get a job at a mansion where people go to get married: all the details of the ceremonies are taken care of by the business. Here Moody is able to mine rich depths of modern absurdity, the comedy of manners of our society, on "the happiest day of our lives." The narrator’s grief for his lost sister, his regret for lending his car, for not offering to drive, and his anger at the way other people are able to move on with their lives are so clearly depicted that you start to think that Moody must be telling his own story. This is a fine book, even if at times it takes pleasure in its own difficulty.

Categories: Fiction