“The Diviners”
by Rick Moody
Published: September 2005
ISBN: 0316085391 
(Updated: September 24, 2006.)
About the Book…
With savvy and structural mastery not unlike Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen, Moody has penned a hilarious and generous novel about ambition, folly, and the tyranny of buzz.
About the Author…
Novelist Rick Moody was born in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1962. His works often demonstrate the concept that money makes no difference in the problems people face. His first novel, Garden State, won Pushcart’s Tenth Annual Editor’s Book Award. The Ice Storm (1994) was adapted into the 1997 film starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. He was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s top 100 creative people the same year. He has also won the Addison Metcalf Award and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
So… another month for another book. This time I think it took me so long just because it took me so long. Lots of people. Lots of events. Lots of “things”. I kept at it figuring that soon I would understand what I had been and was reading but… I have now finished and I still have no idea what this book was about.
Although I understand why the comparison might be made between the structural style of this book and that of Tom Wolfe’s writing, in this book the structural style didn’t do much for the delivery of content (given that I still can’t figure out what that was). Although Rick Moody seems to be a bright, aware, informed guy, the details of the bunches of “stuff” spread throughout the book hindered more than they added. And, these details, together with all of the people (who were maybe fewer in number than it appeared but whom I couldn’t quite keep manage to keep straight), together with the writing style feels like what would happen if you took a bunch of short stories that you couldn’t quite find an ending for, piled them together like a pack of cards and then shuffled.
At this moment, after having spent a month’s worth of reading time on this book, I’m a little irked that I so did. And in this irritation I feel that perhaps we, the readers, are ultimately the “diviners” looking for a spring of inspiration within the pages. And I feel that someone didn’t pass along the trick of divining.
So… all of that written, I give this book a 2 out of 5 hearts on my scale. Maybe I’ll soften up over time and with some distance. Maybe some more meaning will trickle in over the next while. I can only hope.