Too Many Characters, Too Many Doughnuts

THE DIVINERS Rick Moody

So you’re on this long flight and the guy next to you looks interesting and you strike up a conversation. And you were right, he is interesting, he’s erudite and witty and clever, and he can turn a phrase and he starts telling you stories from his home town of Manhattan, stories of men and women (and children) whose lives revolve around a mega TV series in development, an epic miniseries on the history of divining, and of how all the people – production heads, secretaries, actors, bicycle messengers and more – want a piece of the action. And he gets inside all these characters’ heads and makes the whole thing a satire on American pop culture and it’s all very droll, but the thing is, he goes on and on and on, talking of main characters, peripheral characters, relatives of characters and their whims and vices (Krispy Kreme doughnuts, anyone?) so that after a while, your eyes start to glaze over and you start glancing uneasily at your watch and begin to wonder when he’s ever going to stop. That’s what reading Rick Moody’s new book is like.

Worth your while? You’d be better off with Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.