Faber £12.99 pp569
For its first few chapters, Rick Moody’s fourth novel seems ready to deliver a panoramic view of turn-of-the-century America. Set largely in New York City in the days after the disputed 2000 presidential election, its action is centred around an independent film company called Means of Production as it tries to get The Diviners, a multigenerational miniseries,off the ground. The company’s doughnut-addicted owner Vanessa Meandro, is an ambitious harpy who divides her time between looking after her alcoholic mother and abusing assistants. Chief among these is Annabel Duffy, a svelte African-American who is writing a screenplay on the Marquis de Sade’s wife while conducting an affair with Thad Griffin, an action star in search of indy-movie credibility after making a series of films with names such as Single Bullet Theory that simply “give teenagers something to do”.
Annabel’s brother Tyrone, meanwhile, is a philosophy-student-turned-bicycle-messenger who is wanted for questioning about a brutal assault on an art-gallery manager. Other story lines in this traffic jam of a novel involve Ranjeet, a Sikh limousine driver who somehow bluffs his way into directing the first episode of The Diviners; Lois, a devout Catholic accountant who embezzles from Means of Production after Vanessa insults the priesthood; and Vic Freese, a woebegone talent agent who gets involved in the project after mistakenly being sent a copy of the show’s treatment.
While all of this might make The Diviners sound like some sort of cutting-edge movie-business romp, it is far too turgid to generate that sort of heat. Every time Moody appears to be on the verge of building some narrative momentum, he launches into a digression that stops the novel dead in its tracks. Disquisitions on food addiction, yoga, the history of the bike messenger, Mormonism and vernacular English do little to draw the reader into the book. There are entire chapters that seem to have been imported from other novels, such as a party in Santa Monica where a popular novelist tries to interest her friends in a quack doctor’s anti-ageing treatment, a corporate retreat where participants are sent out on a desert-survival course, or the downfall of a band of eco-terrorists run by a psychotic social worker. Characters arrive encrusted with pages and pages of back story yet somehow manage to remain opaque. Thus, we learn all about Ranjeet’s relationship with his computer-boffin cousin and his manic son, but wind up understanding little about the man himself.
Advertisement
The novel’s climax involves a 40-page, all-seeing view of the various characters as they settle down to watch a television show. As it turns out, the plot and characters of the show, The Werewolves of Fairfield County, receive far more explanation than those of The Diviners ever get. This sort of exasperating misdirection is characteristic of a novel that sets out to encompass contemporary America, but proves to be little more than a record of whatever was on Moody ’s mind when he sat down at his word processor each morning.
Available at the Books First price of £11.69 on 0870 165 8585