Rick Moody Needs To Thank John Leonard

This, more than anything I’ve read, seen, or heard (including a live appearance by Moody at City Arts and Lectures), makes me want to read The Diviners.

Before it raptures up and wimps out, Moody’s most recent novel, The Diviners, is not only longer and funnier than his previous three but also more accommodating. While he may still rev his motor too much, he is thinking out loud about larger matters than the substance abuse, sexual dysfunction, and sudden death in the northeast suburbs that preoccupied Garden State, The Ice Storm, and Purple America. In developing a Marx Brothers meet Thomas Pynchon plot about a frantic search, in the weeks immediately following the dead-heat presidential election of November 2000, for a much-hyped but mysteriously missing television script on dowsing through the ages, he explores the American thirst for something, anything, to believe in, our national hunger for the latest trumped-up or knocked-off meanings.

Such an exploration, itself unscrolling like a screenplay from "Opening Credits and Theme Music" on page 3 to "Epilogue and Scenes from Upcoming Episodes" on page 549, lets Moody spend satiric time in dream factories that pander to such base faith needs both in "the conspiratorial enterprise of Manhattan" and on the left coast where pop culture’s psychic yardgoods are tie-dyed and haberdashed ("the light that illuminates the world begins in Los Angeles"). Besides elaborating an entirely imaginary history of water-seeking dowsers who make magic like a bunch of druids, and then, as if to trump himself, inventing yet another TV show— about werewolves in Fairfield County, Connecticut—that everybody in The Diviners is said to watch compulsively, he allows himself to care about, even as he ridicules, a half-dozen complicated female characters, a bipolar bicycle messenger, a priapic action-adventure movie star, a network vice-president with multimedia conglomerate problems, and a New England minister who has begun to have his doubts about God. And there is time left over to mourn the November 2000 abduction of the American presidency by bullyboys, dangling chads, and party-hack Supreme Court justices while simultaneously apostrophizing deep-fried sugar with a hole in it:

The great spiritual benefit of the Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut is the sensation of nothingness. The satori that is Krispy Kreme is the obliteration of self, the silencing of the voices that are attached to the oppressions of life.

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