Vanity is a major force in ‘The Diviners’

Ambitious. Audacious. That’s Rick Moody’s new novel, “The Diviners,” the exuberant tale of a proposed miniseries called “The Diviners” that exists in concept only, yet spins the wheel of fortune for a cast of dozens.

“The light that illuminates the world begins in Los Angeles,” Moody writes in the opening sentence of the prologue, titled “Opening Credits and Theme Music.” This 11-page incantatory paean to the coming of each day and the movement of the Earth ends in New York-Brooklyn, to be exact, the coming of morning to the brownstones of Park Slope. “A day of dawns. A jubilee. Morning, just after the election, year two thousand.”

Moody has used this device before (in the biblical opening to his 1997 novel “Purple America,” as Hex Raitliffe cares for his ailing mother, for instance). Still, the introduction is risky. Romantic. Florid even, yet oddly fitting, a hint of the outpourings to come. And the satiric plot line is elastic enough for the chorus crying out the obsessions of this country in the murky aftermath of the 2000 presidential election.

Why begin in Los Angeles? Because this new century’s culture originates in Hollywood, hub of the world’s entertainment business. In that context, New York, the novel’s primary setting, is a far outpost.

This is the fourth novel and first “comedy” from Moody, whose comedic tendencies are on record. His 1994 novel, “The Ice Storm,” opens with the line, “So let me dish you this comedy about this family I knew when I was growing up,” and gives an astringent chronicle of suburban Connecticut in the early 1970s, replete with emotional mayhem and physical tragedy. (“The Ice Storm,” Moody’s second novel, was made into the critically acclaimed 1997 film starring Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline and Joan Allen as the older generation, and Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood as the younger.)

With “The Diviners,” Moody manages a noticeable shift in tone and range that seems to herald a new phase in his work. He has widened his focus beyond the catastrophes of the nuclear family articulated in his earlier novels, two short story collections and his 2003 memoir of his struggles with depression, “The Black Veil.” And he gives full-throated voice to the rhythms and comedic energy of his distinctive style.

The key players are a typical, Moody, wounded parent/child duo. Vanessa Meandro is an independent film and TV producer, tyrannical, neurotic, overweight, desperate to make a successful deal. Her mother, Rosa, is a fulminating alcoholic who during inpatient detox begins to overhear cellphone conversations from her daughter’s office. She also picks up fragments of cellphone chatter among politicians planning to send buses to Florida to witness the presidential election recount.

Then there is Ranjeet, the Sikh driver who overhears Vanessa in his backseat and realizes she is in film. (“Movies. It is a word as perfect as the two perfect etymological American exports: okay and Coca Cola.”) He stalks her through a morning binge at a string of Krispy Kreme shops and ends up working for Vanessa in “matters of television.” There’s Annabel Duffy, Vanessa’s lissome black assistant (who has dubbed the boss “Minivan”) and her bipolar artist brother Tyrone, the adoptive children of a Congregationalist minister in Newton, Mass., and Thaddeus Griffin, action star of “Single Bullet Theory.” Moody brings each character to life through a sort of osmosis, giving each a specific vernacular and state of mind.

The ongoing goof of this novel is the almost random conception of “The Diviners,” a high concept, multigenerational saga about dowsers or diviners, those trained to use the forked stick and mystical incantations to find water.

The proposed story is concocted by Thaddeus, the has-been actor, and Annabel on a drunken date while his wife is out of town. Vanessa has demanded a treatment that Annabel seems to have lost. Thaddeus advises Annabel to make it up, “like storytellers around a campfire.”

He launches into the “monologue about being outside the empire, outside the establishment, the monologue about how creativity comes at the expense of conventional thinking, at the expense of formula, at the expense of abstract values like tradition and love. The monologue about creativity as revolt, as bloody insurrection.”

Thaddeus’ story begins with the Mongolian rainmaker Zoltan, and ends with the founding of Las Vegas, and there’s a subplot about the Mormon exodus. (Thaddeus envisions Robert De Niro as the polygamous Brigham Young, Susan Sarandon as his wife Honora, a dowser).

The “Diviners” project balloons into a bicoastal, insider phenomenon through a mixture of false assumptions, gossip, treachery and fights for control of the property before it even exists as a script.

“The Diviners” is laugh-out-loud funny, with a satiric edge but none of the sour contempt so pervasive these days. Moody is even relatively tender with Jeffrey Maiser, network programming chief for Universal Beverages Corp., who has the power to greenlight “The Diviners.”

Maiser is all-powerful in his own setting, but vulnerable when he attends a corporate retreat with the “makers and sellers of alcoholic beverages, snack foods, television broadcasting, film production and marketing and the newest line of business, interstate mortuary services.”

As Maiser tries to build an alliance with Lorna Quinson, the “ivory-maned battle axe of Interstate Mortuary Services” (shades of “Six Feet Under”), he realizes the attraction he feels for her is in part that she reminds him of what he lost when he embarked upon the “madness” of his fetish for young girls -- “the grace of the women of his own age.” Reading Moody requires patience. In “The Diviners” there are dead spots: The Santa Monica Botox party hosted by the thriller writer Melody Howell Forvath seems stale. The bombing of a Krispy Kreme franchise in Concord, Mass., by the revolutionary Retrievalists seems flat. Lois D’Annunzio, the embezzling accountant for Vanessa’s company, seems expendable.

This is the risk taken by a novelist who incorporates ideas and information into word castles he spins in the darkening skies. His narrative intelligence seems to function through proliferation -- of incident, of language, of character. So you get back on the Moody express, wondering, can he make this work? There are so many loose ends to tie up, such a huge thematic buildup, so many points of view to resolve.

When the “Epilogue and Scenes From Upcoming Episodes” arrives, with ever more potent zings of recognition, it is clear that Moody has constructed a satiric masterpiece. Despite its flaws, “The Diviners” is an astonishing book. More Cirque du Soleil than Brecht, but dazzling nonetheless.

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Jane Ciabattari is the author of the short-story collection “Stealing the Fire.”