The Diviners - ISBNLookup.com

The New Yorker

Moody’s latest novel revolves around a proposed mini-series epic that follows generations of a tribe of diviners, from the conquests of the Mongols to the founding of Las Vegas. Unbeknown to the agents and studio executives scrambling for the rights, there’s no script, only a synopsis concocted by an office assistant and her lover, a married action-movie star. Meanwhile, a producer’s aging alcoholic mother disappears; an accountant embezzles thousands of dollars and goes on the lam; and a schizophrenic bike messenger is falsely accused of attempted murder. Moody’s kinetic prose calls to mind Bruce Wagner’s kaleidoscopic Hollywood novels, but it lacks Wagner’s acerbity and airy humor. One major riff concerns a popular television show about a community of werewolves (and involves a wearisome recounting of camera angles). Moody’s novel, like the high-production-value shows it refers to, has an earnest sententiousness that overshadows its well-crafted fluency.

Stephen Metcalf

Rick Moody is an exhausting writer, and his prose is virtually impossible to meet halfway. And yet he writes with a firm conviction that Americans have served up to themselves the worst of all possible worlds, a condition well captured by the manic glad-handing of the entertainment industry. In Moody's America, no one possesses either inner resources or a sense of tribal belonging. The more outer-directed we have become, the more impersonal…Moody's writing style is perverse, but its intent is to force this gruesome paradox back on his audience.
— The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Let it be said that Moody never suffered for want of ambition. Ostensibly about the exploits of Vanessa "Minivan" Meandro-an overweight, pathologically cruel film-and-television producer, and her attempts to produce a 13-part miniseries about diviners-Moody's latest tome follows the tangentially connected stories of at least a dozen characters around the time of the 2000 election recount. Vanessa has no idea who authored the treatment or the novel the miniseries is supposedly based on; her accountant absconds with her production company's funds; her mother suffers delusions brought on by nonstop drinking. Meanwhile, a second-rate action film star is making demands, a television executive has a perversion for young, handicapped girls and a bike messenger may have murdered the gallery curator who touted his art as genius. The point: if Hollywood is a vision factory, these are its false diviners. They are all very well drawn (and the list goes on). But there's more: the portentous first chapter (which indulges in 11 pages of inert descriptions of the sun rising at every point across the globe), the book's end-of-Clinton-era setting and its relentless dissection of L.A.'s capitalist fantasy mentality reach toward summative critique of an era la The Corrections. But Moody ends up having more to say about narcissism in its infinite vicissitudes than he does about its effects. Major ad/promo. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

A serious-minded novelist offers a sprawling satire of show business, with results that fall short of divine. For his first novel in eight years, Moody (Purple America, 1997) has written what might charitably be described as an epic Tom Wolfe parody, or a New York spin on the Hollywood of Bruce Wagner's novels. Having squandered some critical capital with an uneven collection of short fiction (Demonology, 2000)and a literarily indulgent memoir (The Black Veil, 2002), Moody returns with an ambitious audacity, taking his fiction beyond the drug-addled, angst-ridden grandchildren of Cheever Country that his readers have come to expect. The novel concerns the buzz building around a project titled "The Diviners," a multi-national, multi-generational miniseries about the age-old practice of searching for water by dowsing. Yet "The Diviners" upon which the plot pivots is itself a cultural mirage, generated from a script that does not exist, based on a novel that does not exist. Its development from nothing into (perhaps) something finds Moody detailing the inner workings of a New York production company known for indie films, as it schemes to break into the more lucrative television mainstream. As the novel attempts a sweeping and scathing indictment of contemporary culture, the narrative envelopes eco-terrorism, embezzlement, mental illness, religious hypocrisy, a variety of sexual peccadilloes, the hanging chads of a contested presidential election, the domination of multi-media conglomerates, the packaging of a Britney-styled pop tart and, at the thematic center, the insidiously addictive properties of Krispy Kremes. The novel develops few of its many characters beyond caricature, and most ofits chapters are comic set pieces that minimally push the plot along. It all adds up (or doesn't) to a bloated book about cultural bloat, an empty look at cultural emptiness. A novel that might well have been more fun to write than it is to read.