Moody Blues
HEMINGWAY, MARK
Mark Hemingway Moody Blues RICK MOODY DEM0N0L0GY Rick Moody shouldn't be any good. Every leading indicator points the wrong way. He has been adorned with several major literary awards. He won a...
...and a good thing since there are some just awful parts...
...The Double Zero," an updated retelling (or "cover version" as it was called when it was originally published) of Sherwood Anderson's classic story "The Egg," actually produces some interesting results, at least more interesting than the original...
...We ought to be grateful for that rather than holding him personally responsible for the New Yorker or the horrors of academic writing programs...
...Elsewhere, Moody is a very funny writer...
...Consider for a moment the first sentence of the title story, "Demonology," which itself has won two major literary awards and has already been anthologized four times since it was first published three years ago: lowing after, grownups bantering about the schools, or about movies, about local sports, about their marriages, about the difficulties of long marriages, kids sprinting up the next driveway, kids decked out as demons or superheroes or dinosaurs or as advertisements for our multinational entertainment providers, beating back the restless souls of the dead, in search of sweets...
...Yes...
...More painful still is Moody's penchant for loading his descriptions with brand names and indictments of what he sees as soulless consumerism...
...One should never use a phrase like "multinational entertainment providers" unless ones means to be funny...
...This means we have to put up with a lot of uneven work, straining under all the clever structural conceits...
...In Moody's hands the comedic portion of that situation exceeds even its irony...
...The first story in the collection, "The Mansion on the Hill," takes the form of an open letter to the narrator's dead sister...
...Moody's work is far more than the sum of its parts...
...The narrator is having a hard time piecing his life back together since her death, a situation complicated by the fact that his sister died driving en route to her wedding rehearsal, and he now finds himself working at a wedding planning service...
...Humor undercuts the grief, and the story's absurd climax is both moving and elegiac...
...And jejune...
...lections of short fiction, of which this is his second...
...He just is...
...The Double Zero" ends with the narrator ticking off a list of chain restaurants as a lament for his family-owned diner's going under...
...as their parents tarried behind, grownups folOne should never use the phrase "multinational entertainment providers'" unless one means to be funny...
...V Little Brown & Company, 288 pages, $24.95 288 pages, $24.95...
...In fact, stories like "The Mansion on the Hill," "Demonology," and "Hawaiian Night" are so well crafted with such profoundly specific and memorable characters that we forgive Moody indulgences that would sink lesser writers...
...He has achieved multiple publication of sometimes painfully original novels at a young age, and he publishes colThey came in twos and threes, dressed in fashionable Disney costumes of the year, Lion King, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, or in the costumes of televised superheroes, protean shape-shifting, thus arrayed, in twos and threes, complaining it was too hot with the mask on, Hey, Vm really hot!, lugging those orange plastic buckets, bartering, haggling with one another, Gimme your Smarties, please...
...He can also be horrifically banal, even when he is stylistically superb, it being one of the plagues of contemporary "creative writing" to separate style from substance...
...But the painfully flat"Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set" is the result of an even more contrived experiment, a narrative that takes the form of the liner notes to an extended soundtrack, representative of the musical tastes of an "undistinguished American...
...No, Moody shouldn't be this good...
...A weird image to start, great rhythm, the imagery is pleasantly evocative if not original, and "beating back the restless souls of the dead" is a nice surprise—even 106 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 if it does leave the reader a bit bewildered, as Moody often does...
...If Moody could see past this nonsense, he might find he's even smarter than he thinks...
...In "On the Carousel," a mother living in Los Angeles and working on the fringes of the entertainment industry wonders about living in a city "where lives are influenced by demographically calculating mass-market fictions," only to conclude, "Are these questions equally ridiculous...
...Of course since he is a young, contemporary writer who gets Guggenheims and is beloved by the New Yorker, he is tediously obsessed with appearing original, largely at the expense of his craft...
...But it doesn't matter...
...He won a Guggenheim fellowship last year...
...He is fawned over by the New Yorker...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
