Entry 5:

I'm with you, Tony. I'm with you so much that I wonder if we're not just ciphers, interchangeable members of the "Moody Generation," that bloody crossroads where the verb squander and the direct object potential meet. "Fahnstock" left the same worry with me that it left with you--that perhaps one was too close to Moody's subject matter to judge him. (If Wilkie Fahnstock's cassette collection were ever lost, it could be pretty much regenerated from my collection of LPs and CDs.)

I first had this feeling when reading Moody's preface to the paperback edition of his first novel, Garden State. He wrote of his obsession with the Feelies' album Crazy Rhythms, which he'd first heard on Boston's WBCN (oracle of my youth). I myself listened to that album night after night my junior year in college, at full-blast on one of those systems where plugging in the headset turned off the speakers, and unplugging it turned them back on. Most nights, I'd inadvertently jerk the cord out when I pitched onto the carpet around 3 a.m., simultaneously passing out into a sound sleep and waking up the other 23 residents of my entryway. So I was not only sampling the Fahnstock Selection, I was using the Fahnstock Method.

That said, I don't think my criticism of Carver's class-boundness can be applied to Moody. Every writer's perspective is to some extent determined by his class, or his way of life. But Carver's characters are to an unusual degree sealed off from people who are in any way unlike them. You seldom meet their bosses or their enemies, and their friends are unproblematically similar to them. When a lesbian and a black Vietnam vet appear in Carver's excellent story "Vitamins," it's almost shocking. For all the easy clichés about the "raw," "Western" quality of Carver's stories, the infrequency with which his characters are challenged by social newness makes them rather tame. Nobody enters a Carver story like a cyclone.

By contrast, Moody's characters frequently rub up against foreign situations, exotic dilemmas, and people their experience has in no way prepared them to understand. The best example in this book comes from "The Carnival Tradition." It's the weird rooftop encounter between the yuppie dancer M.J. and the Hispanic crack house kid with the "spectacular Caravaggio mug" whom she thinks of as "Angel" (real name: Mike). He agrees to help her get into her locked house, and then makes his move. I don't usually use "disturbing" as term of esthetic approval, but Moody's description of the way their embrace veers from consensual sex to near-rape is something else. Another example, later in the story, is Gerry's attempt, while wandering around a party, to buttonhole a black servant about how it feels to be a "staff person." ("You should mind your own business," she replies.)

Now, at the risk of unnecessarily throwing down a gauntlet, I'd say it would matter less even if Moody's work were sealed off the way Carver's is. That's because the world of "over-educated people from the suburban Northeast" is simply more important than Carver's world, if only by virtue of having been civilized by the prior observation of other writers, from Hawthorne and Melville to Cheever and Updike. Maybe that sounds snobbish, but as some Brit--Auberon Waugh, maybe--put it, snobbery is the belief that interesting people are more interesting than uninteresting people.

And maybe that's why Moody gets compared so often to Cheever. I'd never seen much of Cheever in Moody's work until part two of "Carnival," but there's plenty there. First, in the story's nice evocation of high WASP barbarism (on Halloween, Mr. Foster buys foam and toilet paper and other supplies in hopes his guests will vandalize nearby houses). Second, in the eye for social awkwardness, as when Gerry gets trapped in conversation with the Dune-reading loner Dinah Polanksi, who was "always closing in to a range of 12 to 14 inches, a distance more frequently associated with conversational styles of Mediterranean nations. He could see a patch of dermatitis on her brow. She was in need of a cream of some kind." Third, in the many-layered evocation of isolation amidst gaiety that I mentioned a couple days ago.

I cannot end this exchange without: 1) steering readers to a paragraph (pp. 68-69) in "The Double Zero" (a story I otherwise don't like much) that describes the stupidity, sexual habits, and herd instinct of ostriches. It may be the funniest passage I have read by a living writer. And 2) congratulating you for your superb classification of Barth and Pynchon as "High Paranoid."

It's always fun, Tony,
Chris