The Diviners
by Rick Moody
Little, Brown

I suppose that someone could use words like "affectionate," "unflinching," "rollicking," and "generous," adjectives taken directly from the liner notes, to describe Rick Moody's newest novel. But I can't say that I would agree with them.

"The Diviners" continues where the author's previous novels left off, exploring themes of alienation, family dysfunction and the peculiar sexual behaviors that these breed. The book reads as a savage parody of our culture and values, in which vulnerabilities are not only exposed, but mocked, relationships are reduced to a means of exploitation, and the mundane, the nuts and bolts of everyday life, made to seem not only absurd, but inconsequential.

Ostensibly, this story is about the development of the script for a television miniseries entitled "The Diviners," an incongruous and utterly ludicrous story of (among other things) divination (the art of finding water underground using only a forked stick), barbarian hordes, Mormons, a guy named Babu, the Gobi Desert and the founding of Las Vegas. With nearly every one of the novel's thirty-one chapters told from a different character's point of view, the narrative is rambling, fractious and disjointed. Set in the early months of 2000, it swings wildly from coast to coast, New York to California, Las Vegas to Newton, Massachusetts.

This list includes a Sikh cabbie who trades his traditional turban and beard for a suit and goatee, abandoning his wife and autistic son; a mixed race film-producer's assistant who conducts an affair with a B-list movie star and contracts chlamydia; her mentally fragile brother, accused of smashing in the skull of a Chinese-American woman with a brick; their adoptive white brother who attempts to shed his bland suburban identity by falling in with the leader of separatist cult, and many, many others.

Keeping track of each character and their dealings quickly becomes dizzying. Names, narrative voices, tangents, and memories are strewn throughout the novel indiscriminately. In a strange kind of role, the script both ties the many characters together and serves to echo the novel's own structure and tone. Like the script, the novel itself is an aimless, fanciful patchwork of epic scope in which storylines are followed for a time, then dropped, never to be resolved, and in which symbols are frequently deployed with no reference or significance. Unable to gain any traction we are simply borne along by the author's language and by the expectation that something, anything, is going to happen that will make the hundreds of pages that came before it meaningful.

Of course, nothing happens, and it is hard to understand why. Perhaps, by inhabiting this bizarre vision of America, an echo of our own, with vacuous characters and their inane activities, Moody is making a point about the quality of contemporary culture. Maybe we are supposed to laugh at this portrait of American life, to be bemused by self-serious characters who can do nothing right and are too caught up in their lives to even notice. Maybe this odd stew of geography, sexuality, race, gender and idiocy is in some way a twisted homage to our nation as it faces a new millennium.

Or maybe not. There is too little charity and sympathy, and far too much fascination with failures and shortcomings, for this to be homage of any sort. And the characters are a little too pitiful for us to laugh at without our amusement turning into ridicule, and our smiles into smirks. By ignoring those aspects of human nature that allow us enjoy each other, and to live with ourselves, Moody draws an especially bleak vision. This is not to say that this vision is entirely inaccurate; often, it is right on target, especially when concerned with the vapid entertainment culture that seems to permeate every aspect of our lives.

But by crafting such a vision with nothing to temper it, Moody sells us, and himself, short. We no longer have a pointed cultural critique, or an "unflinching" and "rollicking" look at American life, but a fantasy world, one that distantly echoes our own, but is too grim to resonate with power.

— Nate Wood (wood.nathan.a@gmail.com)