Score

I'm reading "The Diviners" by Rick Moody which I totally scored at the BEA this weekend, a festival I was totally basically snuck into and I can't believe my luck. The novel (apparently slated to come out even later then it's claimed September 12 release date [now I'm just gloating]) is, to my mind, out of control fantastic. Although I just read Dale Peck's legendary review of The Black Veil ("Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation") and I was all "Huh. Maybe Dale's right. Maybe I'm a sucker for patently awful fiction." After all, what Peck describes as Moody's penchant for pissing contestian beginnings could not be an apter description of the opening of this novel which I could describe quite patly (A description of the light of the sunrise starting in Los Angeles and over the course of like twenty pages that aforementioned light making its way slowly Westward across the entire planet before landing on New York City) and in a way that makes it sound completely interminous but fuck it, man, I was completely enrapt. In his review Peck also predicts that Moody's next novel would be his version of The Corrections, which is probably sort of true here, although it does not deal with a family per se but rather a loose collection of interelated charaters orbiting the entertainment industry.

I'm about halfway through the book at this point and although it hasn't really maintained the pace it opened with, as in, I could actually put it down at some points, a feat I couldn't hope to accomplish through the first few chapters, so concerned was I with the the plight of an overweight producer and her Sikh livery driver, I still find myself inhaling it with the same gusto I displayed for like The Order Of The Phoenix. It's that engaging.

So, I don't know. It's a weird thing with Peck. I was in a class of his once upon a time and I quite respect him. This was before he gained his current status as a reviewer. He has since come down quite hard on two things I quite enjoy, being Rick Moody and Six Feet Under and, now that I think about it, it's quite possible he had a hand in the way I approached my prose after Grad School, when I spent a lot of time paring down and basically doing away with the sprawling influence of not even the whole of David Foster Wallce's ouvre but simply one novel: Infinite Jest. Looking back at just this post it seems that I might have started to shed that impulse.

Which is probably for the best. The very first reaction I had to this book was "Fuck, this is the kind of book I'm dying to write." The first few chapters are completely bursting with forward momentum, there's even a bike messenger scene that's just pure propulsion. And throughout the whole thing is this overflowing of detail and, well, it's basically exactly the kind of story I'd like to be telling.

Anyway, I'll probably be finishing it in a day or so, so I'll have more to say then. I'll note, though, that I'm a complete sucker for things like the endings of Infinite Jest or Purple America or The Corrections, endings that leave a lump in my throat and I that have to read quite a few times and that I always end up talking to someone about. And these all seem to be the kinds of books that Dale Peck loathes. And I know for sure that he's thought about it much more than I have. I'm sure he's smarter than I am. I'm sure he's read more than I have. But, and maybe I'm just an ape here, I get so much personally out of these books. So who gives a fuck, right? I'm part of the problem sure, but it's not everybody's problem now is it. Maybe it is. I could go back and forth all day so it's probably better if I just go back to reading.

Comments

[Ned Vizzini]

I picked it up at BEA too. It's great!

God the opening was fantastic. Inspiring. I'm up to Tyrone the bike messenger. Hope it stays this good.

This is the first of his I've ever written. I'm gonna spam it on my website (I write books for YA).

Rock on.