Excess without success

Fiction: 'Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." So wrote literary hatchetman Dale Peck in his 2002 review of Moody's last book, the quasi-memoir The Black Veil.

As a critical provocateur, Peck can be deeply silly at times. But his prediction that Moody would follow The Black Veil with "a sprawling 'social novel' in the manner of The Corrections" has proved rather prescient. It's possible, of course, that Moody, not a man who appears unsure of his own talents, took that prediction as his starting point for The Diviners, which does feature among its vast cast a queenily repellent wine critic named Randall Tork who bears more than a passing resemblance to Mr Peck himself.

Opening with a prologue (or, as the writer would have it, "Opening Credits and Theme Music") which, in prose that would make Cecil B DeMille blush, follows the course of the dawn from the shores of California around the entire globe, this 560-page opus is set in New York, Los Angeles and Texas over the weeks following the 2000 US presidential contest between George W Bush and Al Gore. Despite passing references to hanging, pregnant and dimpled chads, events in Florida never register as much more than background interference on Moody's big screen, along with the impending dotcom collapse and other signifiers of that dim and distant time.

At the centre of the story, inasmuch as there is one, is Vanessa, a New York-based producer of independent films on such subjects as Charles Manson's remarks before sentencing, the last years of Mark Rothko and the arrest of the Weather Underground. Known to her underlings as Minivan on account of the impressive girth she has attained due to an addiction to Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and oppressed by the apparently insoluble problem of her mother's alcoholism, Vanessa becomes intrigued by a proposal for a TV mini-series, the titular The Diviners. This sprawling epic on the implausible subject of water dowsing over the course of two millennia begins with the Huns rampaging across central Asia and climaxes with the founding of Las Vegas. The conceit is that the whole series is a spoof, dreamed up on the spur of the moment by Annabel, a desperate development executive, and Thaddeus, the priapic movie star with whom she's having an affair (could a movie star really be named Thaddeus?). Despite the absence of an author, a script or a story, the project gathers momentum within the movie business, with agents and studio executives fighting over the rights. Meanwhile (there are a lot of meanwhiles), a Sikh limo driver named Ranjeet convinces Vanessa to employ him because of his deep understanding of the mythical importance of such cultural artefacts as the 1970s TV series Roots. Also in the stew is Annabel's brother Tyrone, a former stalwart of the East Village art scene of the early 1980s, now plying his trade as a bike messenger.

Clearly there is ample scope here for satire, although Moody is hardly feasting on fresh meat. The movie business, apparently, is full of shysters, megalomaniacs and the mildly deranged. In the US, real power lies in the hands of a small cabal. Well duh, as we used to say back in 2000. For the first couple of hundred pages, The Diviners does manage to fizz and crackle, and the reader may be willing to overlook the wobbles in tone as Moody takes on the voice of yet another character. But inevitably the showing off begins to grate, and one starts longing for more restraint and precision in the writing. The description of a Botox party for ladies who lunch in Beverly Hills has little verve and less authenticity; Ranjeet begins to sound uncomfortably similar to Peter Sellers's Indian doctor in Goodness Gracious Me. And the characters keep coming: a studio head whose sexual preference is for disabled adolescents; a judge whose decisions are informed by a combination of Nietzchean will to power and frathouse solidarity. Where will it end? And then it does, suddenly, on the eve of Bush's confirmation by the Supreme Court.

Perhaps it's this very quality of supersized American excess which Moody was trying to evoke in this sprawling shaggy dog story of a novel. But he invites us too often to admire his stylistic tricks for us to believe that he really wants us to feel by the final page as if we've spent all night flipping across 500 channels while gorging on Krispy Kremes. Yet that is exactly the effect.

Hugh Linehan is Entertainment Editor of The Irish Times

The Diviners By Rick Moody Faber, 567pp. £12.99