Synopsis
During one month in the autumn of election year 200, scores of movie-business strivers are focused on one goal: getting a piece of an elusive, but surely huge, television saga. The one that opens with Huns sweeping through Mongolia and closes with a Mormon diviner in the Las Vegas desert; the sure-to-please-everyone multigenerational TV miniseries about diviners, those miracle workers who bring water to perpetually thirsty (and hungry and love-starved) humankind. Among the wannabes: Vanessa Meandro, hot-tempered head of Means of Production, and indie film company; her harried and varied staff; a Sikh cab driver, promoted to the office of theory and practice of TV; a bipolar bicycle messenger, who makes a fateful mis-delivery; two celebrity publicists, the Vanderbilt girls; a thriller writer who gives Botox parties; the daughter of a L.A. big-shot, who is hired to fetch Vanessas Krispy Kremes and more; a word man who coined the phrase inspired by a true story; and a supreme court justice who wants to write the script. A few true artists surface in the course of Moodys rollicking but intricately woven novel, and real emotion eventually blossoms for most of Vanessas staff at Means of Production, even herself. The Diviners is a cautionary tale about pointless ambition; a richly detailed look at the interlocking worlds of money, politics, addiction, sex, work, and family in modern America; and a masterpiece of comedy that will bring Rick Moody to still higher levels of appreciation. QUOTES A spirited, side-splitting romp through the scorpion-ridden wastes of U.S. showbizcool, hip and wickedly funnyA prodigiously talented writer, Moody offers a multitude of pleasures. His edgy prose is superb; his comedic talent raises, at a bare minimum, a giggle a page; his immersion in popular culture never compromises an acute, acerbic intelligence. Globe and Mail (reviewed by Guy Vanderhaeghe) A hugely entertaining social satire, The Diviners represents a real change for the writer, at least in tonethough he wasnt making any special effort to be more accessible, he has done just that.The book has such a lyrical, musical quality that its like an easy-to-read Finnegans Wake. Calgary Herald A rollicking novel about the interlocking worlds of entertainment, money and politics.The cast is huge and colourful, and the summing-up of a confused era is reminiscent of Jonathan Franzens The Corrections. Vancouver Sun
About the Author
Rick Moody (born Hiram Frederick Moody, III on October 18, 1961, New York City), is an American novelist and short story writer best known for The Ice Storm (1994), a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973. His first novel Garden State (1992) won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award. His memoir The Black Veil (2002) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. He has also received the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, the Paris Review, Harper's, Details, the New York Times, and Grand Street. He grew up in several of the Connecticut suburbs where he later set stories and novels, including Darien and New Canaan. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, Brown University, received a master's degree in fine art from Columbia University and has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase and Bennington College. According to The Writer's Almanac, Moody dropped out of graduate school at Columbia after a year because he spent most of his time drinking and had a hard time paying his rent or holding a job. Moody stated, "I was a clerk at [a bookstore] and I got fired after one month. They said, 'We really like you and we respect you as a writer, but this cash register thing is just not working out.'" Moody finally checked himself into a mental hospital, got sober, and then he wrote his first novel, Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of New Jersey. He lives in Brooklyn and Fishers Island.
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