Call If You Need Me and Demonology

Dear Chris,

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While I do have a bias in favor of realism, I don't want to leave the impression that I endorse Carver's grumpy dismissal of any kind of formal innovation as "gimmicks," a dismissal which has always smacked of anti-intellectualism and which has contributed to an unfortunate polarization in contemporary American writing, as if one had to choose between flat-footed plainness and wild pyrotechnics, between world and text, between feeling and speculation, between sincerity and irony. Rick Moody, in fact, offers vivid proof of the nullity of any such choice. Like certain of his contemporaries--especially David Foster Wallace, I think--he's trying to negotiate a middle ground between the high paranoid metafiction of the first post-modern generation (Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, etc.) and the suburban realism of John Cheever, John Updike, Ann Beattie, and ... Raymond Carver. As you say, he's writing about "something real, serious, and desperately important," and often his recursive, self-aware, and self-correcting style, rather than pushing you away from the raw emotional matter at hand, brings you closer to it as in this agonizing, agonized peroration from the title story:

I should fictionalize it more, I should conceal myself. I should consider the responsibilities of characterization, I should conflate her two children into one, or reverse their genders, or otherwise alter them, I should make her boyfriend a husband, I should explicate all the tributaries of my extended family (its remarriages, its internecine politics), I should novelize the whole thing, I should make it multigenerational, I should work in my forefathers (stonemasons and newspapermen), I should let artifice create an elegant surface, I should make the events orderly, I should wait and write about it later ... I should make Meredith's death shapely and persuasive, not blunt and disjunctive, I shouldn't have to think the unthinkable, I shouldn't have to suffer, I should address her here directly (these are the ways I miss you). ...

Is this a desperate plea for artifice or an angry disavowal of it? Both, of course, and also a highly artificial--note the crescendos and the judicious commas--performance of grief. And it's only through such means--the ritual of abolishing ritual--that the force of grief can be communicated. This is what stories (some of them, anyway) do: They pretend to give us an unmediated perspective on experience, and sometimes the pretense involves pretending, as above, that you're not pretending anymore, that you can't go on faking it.

We're in agreement about the relative strengths and weaknesses in the collection. "Pan's Fair Throng" is nearly unreadable in its pointless filtering of contemporary life through the aureate diction of a Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast. "Forecast from the Retail Desk" is the shaggy-dog tale of a loser who thinks he can predict the future (Haven't there been a few Saturday night network TV shows on this theme?), and whatever pathos might come from the revelation of his unreliability as a narrator leaks away long before the meager payoff arrives. But "Mansion on the Hill" and especially the two-part, novella-length "Carnival Tradition" are top-notch, as is "Wilkie Ridgeway Fahnsotck: The Boxed Set." This one, as you say, is pure gimmickry: it consists of two parallel columns. The right hand side is a series of mix tapes, the left the biography in liner notes of "an undistinguished American." It's also, if I may speak grandly, the portrait of a generation, or at least of a certain generational type dear to Moody's heart: the introspective, pop culture-obsessed male suburban misfit--a "man of potential," as you put it, who realizes (or squanders) that potential by spending all his time making mix tapes, or by converting his apartment in Hoboken into an empty art gallery, or by frittering away his twenties studying literary theory in graduate school, and eventually moving back in with his parents. Here, I think, your first objection to Carver--that he restricts himself to a single, narrowly defined social class--might apply to Moody as well: He tends to write about overeducated people from the suburban Northeast (New Jersey and Connecticut, primarily) who experience, for reasons having to do with emotional circumstances rather than economic forces, a certain downward mobility--either a willed (and parentally underwritten) descent into Bohemia, or substance abuse, or chicken-suited menial labor.

And here, I confess, my critical distance evaporates, and I simultaneously become hypersensitive to overstatement or inaccuracy. I know these people! I might even be one. So when Moody hits one out of the park--that slacker couple in "The Carnival Tradition," to take the best example--the ball sails into the right-field bleachers, where I'm slumming it with my grad school buddies, appreciating the pastoral glories of the national pastime (but, you know, ironically) in our bowling-style shirts and heavy plastic-framed glasses, and smacks me square in the nose, at which point I cry foul. (Can I pause to complain about Moody's use of italics, the most egregious since J.D. Salinger's? They are to him what footnotes are to David Foster Wallace, a crutch that may soon cause certain important muscles to atrophy.)

But then, in a story like "Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal," he'll let me off the hook by overdoing it. The point of that story--not a bad one, by the way--is that a certain type of intellectually minded young person will use academic discourse as a buffer against feeling, that relentlessly theorizing human relationships is a way of killing them. But Moody loses the satirical point by succumbing to the very habit he wants to satirize. The fine details--a discussion of Lacan in an Upper West Side bar (I'd bet money it's Augies, on Broadway around 107^th); a couple meeting on the IRT, both reading Duras' The Lover--are buried in a wildly over-the-top parody of a certain kind of academese. ("I understood that marriage had feudal origins, and was thus about bourgeois power and patrimony, but I took issue with the fact that we could never even discuss the nuptial commitment, because if we did he said that I was assuming a fascist totalizing language, a feminine language in the becoming of male totalitarian language ...") It goes on,without a paragraph break for pages and pages, and finally the story is only about Moody's ability--sometimes impressive, sometimes not--to mimic the speech and thought patterns of people he seems to believe, as a class, to be hopelessly pretentious and self-deluded. An element of contempt, maybe of self-loathing creeps into these stories--even to as fine, and in its way tender, a story as "The Carnival Tradition"--that bothers me a little because I'm not sure Moody is entirely in control of it. Or do his characters--I almost said, "do we"--deserve it?

My best,
Tony

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This week, our critics look at the grand old man of short fiction and a popular younger author. Click here to buy Call If You Need Me, by Raymond Carver; here for Demonology, by Rick Moody; and here for an explanation of our format.

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