The Diviners
By Rick Moody, Little, Brown and Company, 2005

The Diviners, the big new novel from Rick Moody, is extremely convoluted, but its plot is primarily centered around the idea for a film, an idea concocted as a joke by an action movie star trying to build a new career as a producer of serious movies. The idea, The Diviners, is a giant historical epic about Mongol diviners - supernatural finders of water - who sweep out of the east and bring their magical powers to the rest of the world. The story’s plot is a sprawling one that eventually ends up in Las Vegas, and once the idea for The Diviners gets out, everyone in the film industry on both coasts wants a piece of it.

Thus enter many, many characters: Vanessa, a fat, Krispy Kreme-guzzling harpy of a film producer; Annabel, her aspiring filmmaker assistant who was in on the fabrication of The Diviners; a Sikh limo driver who happens to be an expert on American popular culture and who convinces Vanessa to turn The Diviners into a TV miniseries; Annabel’s brother, a mentally damaged artist who is on the run, wanted for a crime he didn’t commit; a couple of other assistants at Vanessa’s production company who also want to make the big time; an embezzling accountant at the same company; Vanessa’s clairvoyant, alcoholic mother; a group of whacko revolutionaries who aren’t what they seem; a bevy of film industry execs; a few sullen teenagers; and many, many more. Not a single one of the characters is convincingly developed, but they all have a carefully delineated role to play in Moody’s postmodern opus (with the exception of a vile wine critic, who exists solely to allow Moody to take a shot at Dale Peck, a writer who infamously eviscerated Moody in print not long ago).

Despite its generally satirical tone, The Diviners is deadly serious at its heart. The book attempts to conjure some pre-9/11 tension (it is set in 2000, just after the disputed presidential election), and it’s positively drenched in symbolism. References to the four elements-earth, air, fire, and water (light is thrown in, too, I guess as an honorary fifth element) - are all over the story, and as far as I can tell, water symbolizes substance, quality, spirituality, and all manner of good things. Everyone is thirsty for it - hence their obsession with a story about people who know where to find it - but those who promise to slake their thirst, it turns out, are no more than frauds. Without water, sadly, we’re all destined to die in fire. At least I think that’s what Moody is trying to say, but it’s not easy to tease the lesson out of a book that climaxes in an episode of a hit television show about werewolves.

Moody doesn’t look very far beyond the obvious targets for his satire, and he’s remarkably efficient at working all the usual suspects into the story: junk food, self-help support groups, antidepressants, Hollywood, television, cosmetics, designer clothes, trendy slang, hack writers of bestsellers, action movies, self-referential horror movies, Botox parties, corporate media, crazy leftists, corporate synergy - it’s all here. The only clichÈ that Moody leaves mostly untouched is the oppressive power of suburbia, but he covered that in previous novels; he has now confidently joined the likes of David Foster Wallace and Tom Wolfe, social commentators who think they’re the first to notice the absurdity of American popular culture. Here, as in the work of Wallace and Wolfe, one gets the sense that the point has been missed, and that all the problems of America - and there are many - can’t necessarily be traced directly back to Hollywood.

In order for satire to work it, like all humor, has to cleave fairly closely to reality; a joke that strays too far from the familiar isn’t very funny, and satire that loses touch with its subject doesn’t have very sharp teeth. Unfortunately, Moody has constructed a story that sits just to the left of credible; given that two of his novels have been made into movies, one has to assume that his description of political wrangling in the film world is accurate, and yet every plot point in The Diviners steps too close to the fantastic to come off as a relevant comment on how we live.

The problem, it seems, is that Moody is no misanthropist, and he consequently gives his characters more respect than they deserve. It’s impossible to believe, for example, that the film industry would be fighting over a miniseries about the Mongol hordes when, as every production company exec knows, your average consumer of miniseries has not the slightest idea what a Mongol is and would, therefore, but extremely unlikely to watch a miniseries about them. Everyone in Moody’s book seems too smart, from the action film star who first weaves the elaborate historical saga of The Diviners, to the network execs who appreciate the power of the story. In the world I live in, The Diviners would never stand a snowball’s chance of making it into development.

Copyright 2005 Ad Media Inc.