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Rick Moody's novels have suffered when translated to the Big Screen in the past. Stephen Metcalf believes that his new novel The Diviners, although implausible as a work of fiction will make a 'fine movie'

Like pork bellies or certain newfangled mortgages, the work of Rick Moody is as well known for its derivatives as it is for the underlying product. The Ice Storm Moody's second novel, was a career and an artistic breakthrough whose perfect weirdness of tone somehow caught the mood – the over-ripeness and deep-tissue malaise – of the early 1970s. The author's good fortune was also, however, his misfortune. After a hit adaptation by the film director Ang Lee, many people now associate the words Ice Storm with Sigourney Weaver consenting to a rite of suburban decadence known as the key party. Meanwhile, Moody has continued turning out those terrifically weird sentences, long incantatory jags of deadpan logorrhea. But so baroque a style has its burdens, and finding a subject as suited to Moody's such as the depths of Nixon era despair has not come easily.

Then in 2002, Moody produced a memoir, The Black Veil, a devil's hash of literary criticism and autobiography. It recounted the author's bouts with mental instability, his drinking and girlfriend problems, and his obsession with an ancestral connection to the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story The Minister's Black Veil. If The Ice Storm had inspired one of the better indie movies of the 90s, The Black Veil inspired one of the great showboat book reviews of all time. "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation," the novelist and critic Dale Peck wrote in The New Republic, and that was only the first sentence. Peck went on to accuse Moody of being sloppy, bombastic, imitative and jejune. Writers seldom deserve our pity – their self-pity more than suffices – but poor Rick Moody, in addition to producing novels and short stories, has been tasked with digging himself out from under a mountain of other people's publicity (OPP).

Perhaps to this end, he has produced a big book, an ineluctable book – I mean, a really big, really ineluctable book. Apparently intended as a definitive and slate-wiping performance, The Diviners offers us an excuse to look at Moody afresh, and to take his ambitions seriously.

The title refers to something that doesn't exist: a never-to-be-written script for a mini-series about the history of mankind's search for sources of drinking water. This unlikely idea for a multi-episode, multigenerational saga in the tradition of "Roots" emerges from an equally unlikely source: Thaddeus Griffin, a B-picture action star who has washed up in the offices of an independent film company, the slyly named Means of Production. "He is the American celebrity," Moody tells us of Griffin, slipping into his grandiloquence, "drunken, immoral and with an enlarged notion of his importance". In spite of his every attempt to kill off his human core, Griffin is charming; and in the course of sleeping his way through the staff, he alights on Annabel Duffy, the beleaguered assistant to the film company's president. Duffy is young, African American, whip-smart and unshakably decent. In the course of Griffin's attempts to seduce her with his bizarre midlevel celebrity voodoo, he picks up on her intellectual earnestness (she is writing a screenplay in her off hours, on the wife of the Marquis de Sade), and pitches her on an idea for an ambitious teleplay. In Griffin's vision, The Diviners would trace the history of divining, or dowsing, or the finding of water under very unpropitious circumstances, all the way from the Mongol hordes to the founding of Las Vegas.

The concept lies somewhere beyond preposterous, and it's meant to strike us that way. (In a strangely touching moment, Griffin ad-libs the entire plot as the couple wander through a charming Greenwich Village mews.) These showbiz people, Moody tells us, fly high on the fumes of their own rhetorical manure, and along the way goad a great many very peculiar fancies toward reality. Taken together they form a fitting milieu for Moody's own talent, which is to present an ensemble cast in the grips of ambient hysteria. Vanessa Meandro, the imperious harpy who runs Means of Production, becomes obsessed with the project only when gripped by the fear she might lose it. The obsession is spiked further by her company's newest addition, a livery driver who hunted her down on her way to Krispy Kreme (Vanessa is a binger), and whose hallucinatory soliloquies, about the power of television, she finds oddly persuasive.

Here, though, a small credibility problem arises. We are now more than a dozen years along since The Player sent up the Hollywood factory, and currently in the midst of Entourage on HBO, in which Jeremy Piven gives the performance of a lifetime as the wholesomely wicked superagent Ari Gold. To surprise an audience with the absurdity of Hollywood is now virtually impossible. As if rising to the challenge, Moody tries to convince us that the content business is even more absurd than the tattlers and satirists have let on. A resulting aura of fabulation pervades The Diviners. With a network honcho on the other end of the phone, Vanessa drones on about "the notion of thirst," and how the white Moroccan pitcher featured on the cover of the Dylan album 'Bringing It All Back Home' is "the perfect narrative representation of the thirst of the mass television audience."

If tonal elegance and muted self control are your thing, then your skin may erupt at the very sight of The Diviners. (Its cover is a kitschy hellscape featuring a bare-chested Hun.) Make it past the Hun, and you quickly find yourself under full on literary assault, as image after image tour-de-forces its way down your throat. "Light upon all these trenches and all these scars and striations of the ocean floor marking the subduction of tectonic plates, where the molten earth bubbles up and makes its presence known in the indigo surface of the ocean," Moody writes in a show offy prelude that will be compared to DeLillo's paean to Bobby Thomson's home run in Underworld, but whose real antecedent is Dickens's invocation of the London fog in the opening of Bleak House Moody's prose is filled with these strange acoustics, with tics and flourishes and gassy perseverations, some of which predominate for a few pages only to disappear a few pages later.

One habit persists, though. A squeegee isn't simply a squeegee; it's "the device known as the squeegee". Twizzlers aren't Twizzlers; they're "the licorice called the Twizzler". And so kiddie baseball is "the system known as Little League" and some money "the US legal tender bills" and the advent of the Internet "the age of so-called electronic mail." (Isn't it so-called "e-mail"?) This is a cheeky locution common to the McSweeney's set, and its usual intent is to show how a scrim of snotty irony can separate us from even the most transactional language.

In The Diviners, the cheek is set off against a competing tendency. Even as Moody provokes the snicker of in group recognition, as when he calls NYU's library the "suicide jumper's site of choice" or Starbucks "the multinational purveyor of overpriced coffee beverages," the goal is more self disgust than self congratulation. And herein lies the interest of this sprawling disaster of a novel. Rick Moody is an exhausting writer, and his prose is virtually impossible to meet halfway. And yet he writes with a firm conviction that Americans have served up to themselves the worst of all possible worlds, a condition well captured by the manic glad-handing of the entertainment industry. In Moody's America, no one possesses either inner resources or a sense of tribal belonging. The more outer-directed we have become, the more impersonal. In Ben Hecht's beautiful phrase, we have cut ourselves off from the soul of our childhood, and yet remain exquisitely immature. Moody's writing style is perverse, but its intent is to force this gruesome paradox back on his audience. Much of The Diviners reads like a roman à clef taken straight from the supermarket headlines, with two subplots lifted from New York magazine cover stories. Of a Botox party in Los Angeles, he writes: "Four or five aging women in sequence, all of them speaking of nothing but boutique sales in town and what certain movies have grossed and who is pandering to the tabloids, as needles plunge into their faces". What do we need to know about these women, beyond the contempt-inducing clichés?

Into such a merciless vision, mawkishness returns with the force of the repressed. About a Lizzie Grubmanesque publicist, we discover: "Meanwhile, in her innermost core, which is surprisingly sweet, Madison McDowell will do almost anything not to let anyone know that she is a virtuoso on the violin, that she was in the All-City Orchestra, first violin, and had the chance to play with the Philharmonic when she was 16." And in one of the book's many furtive climaxes, Duffy's brother, an oracle-genius whose mental illness has him in trouble with the law, makes his peace with their white adoptive mother: "Even as she looks at his face in the monitor of the camera, she can see something else happening, slowly at first, the hand of her older brother, reaching toward the free hand of his mother, the black fingers of her brother's hand walking across the couch toward his mother's white hand, and the film maker is observing a rigorous cinematic detachment while this little thing happens, the black fingers of the son interlacing themselves with the white fingers of the mother." I know of no more appropriate response to The Diviners than to say: it will make a fine movie.

STEPHEN METCALF

© The New York Times