The Diviners

August 1, 2005
Let it be said that Moody never suffered for want of ambition. Ostensibly about the exploits of Vanessa "Minivan" Meandro—an overweight, pathologically cruel film-and-television producer, and her attempts to produce a 13-part miniseries about diviners—Moody's latest tome follows the tangentially connected stories of at least a dozen characters around the time of the 2000 election recount. Vanessa has no idea who authored the treatment or the novel the miniseries is supposedly based on; her accountant absconds with her production company's funds; her mother suffers delusions brought on by nonstop drinking. Meanwhile, a second-rate action film star is making demands, a television executive has a perversion for young, handicapped girls and a bike messenger may have murdered the gallery curator who touted his art as genius. The point: if Hollywood is a vision factory, these are its false diviners. They are all very well drawn (and the list goes on). But there's more: the portentous first chapter (which indulges in 11 pages of inert descriptions of the sun rising at every point across the globe), the book's end-of-Clinton-era setting and its relentless dissection of L.A.'s capitalist fantasy mentality reach toward summative critique of an era à la The Corrections
. But Moody ends up having more to say about narcissism in its infinite vicissitudes than he does about its effects. Major ad/promo
.

Starred review from July 1, 2005
In a dizzying, exhilarating comic narrative, Moody follows the doings of Move On Productions and their feverish attempts to launch the miniseries " The Diviners" , a multigenerational saga about dowsing. Moody introduces, with great affection, a large cast of characters, all of whom are players, whether high or low, in the entertainment industry. Among them, hard-charging Vanessa, head of the company, who, when not feeding her addiction to Krispy Kreme doughnuts, regularly directs scathing ridicule at her minions; a gentle Sikh cab driver with an advanced degree in comparative literature who is suddenly made head of "the theory and practice of TV"; and a bipolar bike messenger who is the only authentic artist of the bunch. Vanessa whips her staff into a frenzy while sidestepping all the usual problems--her embezzling accountant; her mother, who appears to be channeling cell-phone calls; and, oh yes, the script for the increasingly buzzworthy miniseries, which appears to be missing. The propulsive narrative is studded with a series of increasingly hysterical set pieces--an autistic child's most violent episodes are triggered by a certain plump talk-show host; a McDonald's promotion that will package plastic divining rods along with the hamburgers. Moody has an uncanny ability to mimic almost any form of language--script treatments, marketing taglines, Valley Girl speak--in the most hilarious fashion. Usually the purveyor of much darker fare, he seems to be having a blast with this wild and woolly take on our media-saturated culture, and so will his readers. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)