Customer Reviews

The Diviners: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

But nobody's home.

The Diviners is a monumental, 567 page epic that reaches its clutches far and wide to capture as much about end of Clinton era society as possible. Evidently this is Moody's attempt to write the great social novel along the lines of Franzen's 'Corrections' or Delillo's 'Underworld', both blockbuster successes.

Some problems, however:

The novel starts off with a chapter devoted entirely to a huge, all encompassing scan shot that tracks the sunrise around the world: 'The light that illuminates the world begins in Los Angeles. Begins in darkness, begins in the mountains, begins in empty landscapes, in doubt and remorse.' Huh? Light begins in doubt and remorse? Explain please, but we hear no further about the metaphysical implications of this, for we are thrust in the next sentence in the 'city of shadows' where there are hints of human insignificance and nightmares. No more about these as the next sentence brings in an eruption of spectra.

The attempt is clearly meant to dazzle, to show off Moody's linguistic virtuosity. But I found that this the effect of this vast chapter, which tracks the light around the world, guzzling up whole regional histories: 'Light upon the Nanjing Road, traveling westerly, on buildings of British design, light on the four-story French additions to the neighbourhood,' was to exhaust, rather than invigorate.

This throw everything into the mix and see what happens style continues throughout the book. It very loosely centres around Vanessa Meandro, Krispy Kreme addict and megalomaniac and the miniseries 'The Diviners' which runs from ancient Mongolia to present day Utah. A cast of thousands wants a piece of this script - Thaddeus Griffin, a B list action hero; a Seikh cab driver; a bipolar bike courier, the Vanderbilts, a host of production assistants, a thriller writer who gives botox parties. STOP, please, enough. You get the idea.

The structure of the novel is episodic. Episodic structures work fine when there is a core of characters that are developed through the series, but when each chapter spirals away from the previous one in terms of the protagonist, the style, the centre of action, it is hard for the reader to keep up and maintain interest.

It is as if Moody arrived at his computer each morning, threw down a few ideas that were in his head, spiced up the scene with some jazzy prose riffs, then went off happy, repeating the process the next day with an entirely different set of ideas.

Big novels can't afford to be sloppy in terms of structure. They must be constructed carefully, with characters developed properly so the narrative holds the readers interest. They cannot be constructed by throwing in a million different ideas and watching the word count mount. It might seem fun whilst doing it, but the end result is a let down to readers. The register is the same throughout - hyperbole, hysteric realism, each page packing in as much social observation circa 2000 as possible. It doesn't matter whether this lasts for 567 pages, or 200 or 9,000, the novel is no better or worse becasue of it. It is the fundamentals that have to be right in any novel - character, pacing, tempo, style, and the Diviners is a lazy exercise in trying to construct a novel on an impressive scale.

I'd never read Rick Moody before (very bad of me, I know), but hearing a radio interview with the author piqued my interest and I picked up The Diviners. So I was rather unprepared for the stylistic whirlwind within. Reading Moody is like embarking on what you think is going to be a straightforward bit of Google fact-checking and 45 minutes later you end up reading about echidnas and Paris Hilton and having no idea how you got there.

Several chapters in, however, I began to feel messed with, like a vein of contempt for the reader runs through this work. Watch me! Watch me swoop and dive and tug your emotions and expose your 21st-century wired mind, irrevocably changed in ways you weren't even aware of by the Internet and 24-hour 100-channel TV and cell phones and Ipods and Blackberries.

Then I just felt bored. So many chapters. So many word logjams per chapter. So much the same.

Then I began to get worried for Mr. Moody. I picked up his memoir The Black Veil and found some of his runaway thought patterns, word patterns, as symptomatic of his mental illness. I picked up Garden State, and found in this early work a more-or-less straightforward, conventional narrative.

So I can't quite make up my mind about The Diviners. Is Moody a big enough seller now that he feels he can throw off convention and write however the hell he wants to write and do this show-offy postmodern stylistic acrobatics thing that makes the reader work, yet rewards her with a thrill ride, or are his brilliant, layered ramblings the evidence of an unquiet mind?

Perhaps the more learned can enlighten me. I sort of spaced out during those literary theory lectures in college. But as a reader, I say check out The Diviners for the fireworks, but have your guard up and don't expect to fall in love.

I am confess to being one of those "The Ice Storm is one of the highlights of 20th century literature" people. But the novel speaks for itself, and Demonology had some terrific moments. The Diviners, however, is not a good book. It is horribly, and unnecessarily, impersonal; the characters come this close to caricature, and it commits the worse fictional sin: it is dull. I would never have thought myself to be one day saying that of a Moody story, let alone a novel. But it is what it is. Stylisitically, it is not very complex,and I have no good or bad feelings about the writing style, though it is perfectly predictable. Every chapter gives a bit more forward motion plot-wise, but wrapped in this long-winded diatribe about the moment to moment actions of a character who you don't get to know because all you get are the physical movements, catalogued. This is subjective, but I can't stand novels about society's vacuity. It's been done so many damn times by now, and the writers who do it are either substandard (Bret Easton Ellis) or popular but boring (DeLillo). This novel has no blood, no guts, and the laughs come pretty cheap. $26 is a lot to plunk down as a means to get to sleep. The public library, which provides a great service, has spent their money for you. Go there for this book, if you must.

Rick Moody can certainly pen a well-crafted sentence, and his latest novel, The Diviners, is full of these lines, some almost breathtaking. The first chapter itself is a fine example of Moody's talent for stretching a single idea, in this case a sunrise, across pages in prose so deftly written they read like poetry. But the beauty is easily overlooked by the reader who simply wants Moody to get to the point already, and those unfamiliar with Moody's work will think this repeatedly.

The Diviners depicts a brief period in the lives of several desperate characters and their antics just after the 2000 election and just before said election is called for Bush. The central action is the development of an epic miniseries for Vanessa Meandro's Means of Production. Vanessa is a doughnut-popping, nightmarish boss with an alcoholic mother. She keeps her company going with the help of action-film star Thaddeus Griffin, who has managed to seduce Vanessa's employees and has a penchant for masochism. Moody divides the book into character sketches that sometimes advance the plot and other times give him the opportunity to wax poetic for pages about inanimate objects.

There is no denying, however, that the characters are deftly drawn despite their diversity. Among others, Moody has created Annabel, a young black woman with a mentally ill genius of a brother accused of attempted murder; and a screenplay on the Marquis de Sade, where Samantha, the victim, is an Asian-American art dealer left with memory loss after a coma; and Jaspreet, the developmentally disabled son of a Sikh cab-driver-turned-television-expert.

The characters are so intriguing that Moody's typical lack of denouement will likely leave most readers wondering how Annabel will deal with the changes in her life, how Samantha recovers, what happens to Jaspreet and his mother, and more. Yet the book does take place in New York nearly a year before 9/11, leaving readers to ponder a tragic final ending.

If nothing else, The Diviners will leave you feeling unsettled and wanting to avoid Krispy Kreme at all costs, which might mean Moody was successful.

Armchair Interviews says: Avoid Krispy Kreme, how intriquing!

The best thing about any Rick Moody novel is you never know what's going to happen next. He's a brilliant and talented writer. The language he uses is not dense, but vividly descriptive, one of the few authors to really care about how he words his adventures and characters. As for his storytelling - it is unpredictable and something different than boring, generic, typical novels like what's being published everyday. He's creative, funny as hell, and constantly pushing the envelope. Either you hate him or love him, but you do know him. This novel was no disappointment to me. I found myself laughing out loud during the funniest moments - as I've done with certain parts in all his other novels.

This book is a mad rollercoaster ride through contemporary man's pursuit of anything that will fill that internal emptiness that plagues most of us. Yes, Moody seems to lack focus, and yes, he skips around from one seemingly random subject to the next, but isn't that an accurate picture of the world we live in, with its ADHD, its frenetic activity, and its pointless search for the ultimate in satisfaction? We're all looking for a stake in something, whether it be a TV mini-series about the history of diviners, or anything else that is said to exist but doesn't.

Oh, and by the way, Moody's writing is fresh, fast-paced, and fun--just the right combination to pull off a novel like this. I suggest you take a close look at this--Moody's really more in tune with our world today than most fiction writers.

I almost called it satire, but if you have been anywhere near the film industry, you will realize that it is true. If the people read like caricatures, it is because they are all nuts in a crazy business, clawing their way ahead with their nails and moxie. I think previous reviewers might have been surprised by this book -- it's really nothing like Moody's other books, which had a much more serious tone. It's excellent, including the part in the rehab. Highly recommended.

My one word to describe THE DIVINERS is "kaleidoscope." THE DIVINERS is kaleidoscopic as Moody takes broken, colorful personalities & reflects them to us, like a mirror in a kaleidoscope, to create a beautiful work of art for our amusement. Yes, amusement. This is a funny book, people. The characters are like bits of colored glass that are moved, changed, transformed throughout the novel to create a satirical masterpiece depicting the comical side of the "posh" film industry. I loved it! Read the other reviews if you wish to know more details about the book. I, however, never read a thorough review before reading a book. I like to approach my books open-mindedly & not influenced by a fallible reviewer.

From the author of The Ice House and Purple America, two novels with suburban Connecticut themes, comes a story set in New York City that's a dark parody of the entertainment industry. Diviners is a tv miniseries, ostensibly being created by Means of Production, a small NY production house, run by Vanessa Meandro, a woman introduced with a donut fixation and an alcoholic mother she constantly worries about. The production house is staffed by a group of young women and an actor famed for roles in sleazy action films. But Thaddeus Griffin comes up with the idea for Diviners with Anabel Duffy, the beautiful young black woman who's already written a screenplay and whose brother, Tyrone, is an avant garde painter turned bike messenger who is suspected of striking an Asian woman in the head with a brick. It turns out that Samantha Lee was in love with him and they were actually speaking on the phone when she was hit. The development of Diviners and the story of the crime constitute the plot, but what's more interesting is the character portraits, and there are a range of them -- from Vanessa's mother, Rosetta, who hears voices in her head about Diviners, to Jeannine from Means of Production, whose scarred skin is the result of a fire she set in Arizona as a teenager, to Randall Tork, the famous wine writer who falls in love with a Hispanic baseball lover to Reverend Duffy, Anabel and Tyrone's adoptive father who seduced a teenage girl he baptized at a party. The characters are representative of Americans today, obsessed with sex and culture and careers in an industry that exploits it all. At the end, the head of the company set to produce Diviners decides to fire the executive in charge of it and reinvent television to focus on "enhanced reality programming." For the Diviners, a miniseries that would have spanned history to tell the story of water to be cast aside for ridiculous tv, is perhaps Moody's last joke.

I threw this book on the floor after I endured the first 200 pages, feeling that it was an enormous waste of my time.

I guess I had a bad feeling about it right from the start - I was on page 2 and I was already browsing ahead, trying to get to something interesting (if you read the other comments, you already know what I'm talking about - it starts with 10 pages or so describing the sunrise as seen in every goddamned corner of the world). I kindda have an image in my head of the guy sitting in front of his computer as he was writing those pages, thinking to himself "oh yes! YESSS!...I'm on a roll today!.. they're gonna study this in literature classes decades from now!..". Yeah, right...

I had to skip entire pages in various chapters later, too - they were way too boring to go through. But when you do this too often with a book your frustration keeps growing, as you don't really know if you missed something important in the development of the story. At the moment I threw the book away, though, this didn't seem to be an issue, as each chapter was basically revolving around a character, going in every dull, insignificant detail just to let the author show off his monumental writing skills and maybe make the word count go up.

One star out of five.