Diviners' Intervention

Finished Rick Moody's The Diviners last night. 

It's a massive book, full of characters (maybe too full?), wildly ambitious, and occasionally hilarious.  It's also, for the first hundred or so pages, incredibly frustrating -- as opposed to the fairly tight focus that Moody used in his past work, this novel shifts focal characters from chapter to chapter, occasionally lapsing into stylistic experiments, diary entries, and a summary of an episode of a fictitious television show (The Werewolves of Fairfield County, which is either the best Joss Whedon homage since Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners or a remarkably stinging parody of his work). 

Have patience with the novel, though -- soon after that, a structure emerges, centering around the employees of a small production company called Means of Production and their friends, families, and loved ones.  The novel's plot centers around the development of a miniseries called The Diviners, but includes tangents into the art world, corporate politics, psychology, and radical movements.  Reading The Diviners is not unlike some of Nick Tosches's nonfiction, where elements that seem digressive turn out to be critical to the work at hand.  And in the last few chapters, the full shape of Moody's structure becomes clear -- all before he finishes it off with a gut-punch of a final sentence.  What seemed at first to be a trivial book, a comic novel about the entertainment industry, builds to a chilling resonance in its final section.  And while I don't think The Diviners is a perfect book, its ambition and -- for lack of a better phrase -- political dimension make it a deeply relevant one.