Entry 3:

One of Demonology's blurbers describes Rick Moody as a writer who is "swinging for the bleachers." Right! And along with the homers come an unusual number of rally-killing whiffs and embarrassing, boo-inducing double plays. One winds up marking the margins of a Moody book with: "Perfect!" ... "Awful!" ... "Perfect!" ... "Awful!" ... To my mind, the home runs are the two novella-length stories ("The Mansion on the Hill" and the "The Carnival Tradition," the second half of which is a near-masterpiece), "Boys," and "Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set." The strikeouts: "On the Carousel," "Forecast from the Retail Desk," and "Pan's Fair Throng." The others are either qualified successes or qualified failures. In light of that list, I don't think one can simply be a Carverian purist (realism good, trickery bad) on the matter of Moody's gimmicks. "Boys" and "Fahnstock" are two of the most tricked-up stories in the book; "Carousel" may be the most "realistic."

Let's take a home run, "The Mansion on the Hill," which concerns that Moody archetype: the introspective man of potential reeling from what used to be called a "nervous crisis," the once-promising loser returned home. Andrew Wakefield, whose sister just died in a car crash on the eve of her wedding, is working as a fried-chicken mascot--a beautiful device that allows him to see, incognito behind his rubber mask, a long-ago heartthrob with her son. Said heartthrob gets him a job at the eponymous wedding and party-catering center. Here's a piece of realistic narrative to describe it: "It goes without saying that the Mansion on the Hill wasn't a mansion at all. It was a homely cinderblock edifice formerly occupied by the Colonie Athletic Club." Perfect! Now here's a gimmick, aimed at showing what it was like to work there. "Remember that footage, so often shown on contemporary reality based programming during the dead first half-hour of prime time, of the guy who vomited at his own wedding? I was at that wedding." Again, perfect!

At the mansion, Andrew works for Glenda Manzini, marketer of matrimony. In a perfectly imagined scene, he breaks into her office to find unused wheels of birth control pills in her file cabinet: She's been ostentatiously sending him out to pick up her refills in order to pretend she has a sex life. Gimmick or realism? It gets harder to tell. Watching a dozen marriages every weekend, Andrew becomes (that other Moody archetype) a reactionary who doesn't quite realize it: "By 3 p.m., I no longer knew what marriage meant, really, except that the celebration of it seemed built into every life I knew but my own." The words are perfectly straightforward, and they're addressed to Andrew's late sister, which makes them perfectly gimmicky. And the two mesh perfectly.

The climax comes when pompous Brice McCann, who was to have married Andrew's sister, is scheduled to marry at the Mansion after insufficient mourning. Andrew obtains his sister's ashes (the story, it turns out, is addressed to her as an elaborate apology for borrowing them) and dumps them on the groom during the ceremony. Naturally, Andrew gets dressed down by Glenda Manzini: "... I think you have some serious choices to make, Andy, if you want to be part of regular human society, and so forth, which is just plain bunk, as far as I'm concerned. It's not as if Brice McCann were a stranger to me." What's beautiful about this surreal-seeming exchange is that Andrew's right and Glenda's wrong! The internal logic of the narrator's obsession just builds and builds!

But even in this superb story, Moody can get lost in his own rhetorical pyrotechnics. The effects he's striving for appear over his head--which they are certainly not. Andrew declaims "stentoriously that Death Comes to All." (Does he mean "stertorous" or "stentorian"? Stentor is a loud character in the Iliad. You can't speak stentoriously any more than you can spend gatsbiously or marry bovariously.) He complains of "how marriage is just a shrink-wrapped sale item, mass-produced in bulk." (As opposed to what? Mass-produced by hand craftsmen?) He glances "desultorily around the screen." (How do you do that?) The most probable diagnosis for the sloppiness is Moody's mistaking his narrator's "voice" for his point.

Moody is frequently hilarious. It's when he's observing real people keenly--like the Yacht Club kid Marilyn Wendell in "Hawaiian Night," "who would almost certainly get as stout as her mom, and like her mom, be the consort of all local boys until that day"--that one feels one could read him by the shelf-full. But when he's in his "delight-in-the-play-of-language" creative writing mode, as in "Pan," the result is meaningless bloviation and a 3 a.m.-style loss of perspective on whether he's being funny or not: "Next, the town gossip, Mudge, afflicted with a peculiar ocular condition known among chirurgeons as wall-eye, as with a smart additional set of bicuspids, this Mudge strode, all inflated as when the peacock in thick of venery attempts to impress his mate ..." Who cares?

You're right that both Carver and Moody are "answering the intimation that the tools we have for making sense of and communicating experience are untrustworthy and prone to error." But surely every fiction writer since Richardson has known this. You do the best with what you have. Moody's brilliance lies not just in the world he evokes, in the elegiac way he is capable of evoking it--the "mood" of his fiction. It's worth going to Nabokovian lengths (resorting to "gimmicks," if you will) for that mood. Moody knows he's writing about something real, serious, desperately important. It's only when he tries to pretend otherwise and resorts to those "distancing strategies" you speak of that the gimmicks become a problem.

Best,
Chris