This epic tale is conceived by Griffen as he seduces and covers for his co-worker, Annabel Duffy, who has lost the script demanded by their donut-munching boss, Vanessa Meandro. Thaddeus views on the creative process in terms of pornography, and he suggests that Annabel stop working on the biopic of the wife of the Marquis de Sade and concentrate on the story that “gets you off [italics Moody’s]. The one where all the differences in the world, are obliterated in the reprise of the come shot of creation, the big grand unified come shot that made the conditions that made you and me and art and commerce and religion”.
"The Diviners" is Thaddeus’s come shot, though one suspects that he’s getting off on being drunk, on being charming, and generally on being Thaddeus Griffen. Other characters are only slightly less self-obsessed, but these too are propelled by Moody’s sustained exuberant prose which has the speed and punch of a pinball. Just be thankful this energy is contained within a book. So, as the rest of the world counts the chads in Dade County, we arrive in New York in the hands of a writer who can handle the PR girls, the recording artists, the dot-com bust, and a bipolar bike courier, all of whom want a piece of "The Diviners".
What follows in the 31 chapters, plus opening and closting titles, is a display of linguistic acrobatics as Moody jumps from style to style, bringing us new characters to the very end. Looking up from the somersaults, we see marriages break-up from the perspective of autistic children, childhood from the perspective of a group of dialectians who haven't quite left the schoolyard, and identity reconstituted as a patient emerges from her coma.
Meandro buys the Thadster’s story and, come the six page pitch to the networks, barely interrupted by paragraphs let alone the exec at the other end of the phone line, proclaims “The Diviners” to be “the perfect narrative representation of the thirst of the mass television audience”. There is something here for the hundreds of millions who just didn’t know how thirsty they were until those Mongol hoards tore into their living rooms, something for every group that feels disenfranchised by the media elites of the Northeast and the West Coast. This is, as Meandro puts it “a millennialist vision … a reconstituted Jesus strolling down Fifth Avenue, laying waste to readers of the New York Times”.
And herein lies the problem with Moody’s book. His book is about thirst for meaning and the vacuity of the televisual metaphor. Yet, having established that these are deliberately vacuous in order that they can be filled with anyone and everyone’s content (think terrorist soap-opera, think Lost) and so achieve the widest possible audience, he is stuck with it as his own deliberately bloated yet curiously flat metaphor.
Of course there are ironies in the divinational metaphor. In her list of parched wanderers of the deserts of meaning, Meandro omits those media elites of east and west, who see every possible spin-off and marketing scam to hustle the thirsty brethren of the American interior, but feel the thirst to be slaked themselves yet lack the struggle for survival of the metaphorical diviners and religious meaning of their religiously minded market. These media elites are the real subject of Moody’s book, but Moody refuses to explore them, and beyond abstract meaning, he cannot say what thirst possesses his Gawker-reading media bunnies. Instead, Moody borrows a technique more cinematic than televisual to offer up the cliché of his disparate and desperate characters engaged in the same activity. This is done so well you can almost here the elegiac soundtrack, and if you didn’t get the concept of redemption through shared interest, we’re talking Thanksgiving.
The interest in question is, of course, watching television, in this case the hit series The Werewolves of Fairfield County, in which the wealthy and leisured of Connecticut have mutated and breakout into lupine madness every full moon. In the midst of uncaring corpocracy they are forced to develop a moral code lest they be discovered in which the stronger look after the weak, the older look after the younger. In terms of meaning the werewolves have it all, a struggle to survive but also a dynamic sense of belonging. No pampered neurotics thirsty for a way of understanding the pain of their existence here.
Yet having felt a thirst and divined the quencher, Moody refuses to see what happens to the characters who he clearly loves and has made considerable effort to make us love after they slaked their thirst. Do they find God? Do they join the SLBC? Do they become werewolves? We never find out and they are abandoned so that we can breathlessly meet more new characters.
On the one hand, Moody is gesturing to serious issues: the divisions of the United States, the vacuity of our modern lives, and the thought that we might want something more than cars, bars, and moviestars. Yet, on the other, Moody's book is more about his exuberance and showcasing his undoubted stylistic ingenuity as are hastened towards Moody's come-shot of creation. The thing is if there is a come-shot, then it's only been a hand job.
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