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In his first novel in seven years, Rick
Moody gives us a generous, hilarious, and brilliant look at
contemporary America, from coast to coast. In the month after
Election Day 2000, scores of movie-business strivers are focused
on one goal: getting in on an elusive production that seems
sure to be the Next Big Thing. It is an epic about dowsers,
those miracle workers who bring water to perpetually thirsty
(and hungry and love-starved) humankind. The movie—or
TV miniseries, as it eventually becomes—opens with Huns
sweeping through Mongolia and closes with a Mormon diviner
finding water in the Las Vegas desert. A rumor-driven industry
is sure that it will be the please-everyone, multigenerational,
multiethnic hit of all their dreams.
Among the wannabes in pursuit of this ephemeral
project: Vanessa Meandro, hot-tempered head of Means of Production,
a hip New York indie film company; her harried and varied
staff, including a Sikh cabdriver promoted to the office of
“theory and practice of TV” and the daughter of
an LA media big shot, who is hired to fetch Vanessa’s
Krispy Kremes and more; a bipolar bicycle messenger who makes
a fateful misdelivery; two celebrity publicists, the Vanderbilt
girls; a thriller writer who gives Botox parties; a word man
who coined the phrase “inspired by a true story”;
and a Supreme Court justice who wants to write the script.
A few real artists surface in the course of Moody’s
rollicking and intricately woven tale, and real emotion will
eventually blossom for most of Vanessa’s staff at Means
of Production-even for Vanessa herself.
The Diviners is a richly detailed
look at the interlocking worlds of entertainment, money, politics,
addiction, sex, work, and family in modern America. In this
affectionate but unflinching cautionary tale about vanity,
ambition, and life’s unlikely paths, Rick Moody delivers
a masterpiece of comedy that will bring him to a still higher
level of appreciation.
Rick Moody is the author of Demonology,
Purple America, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around
Heaven, The Ice Storm and Garden State,
which won the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award. He
is a past recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim
fellowship. Moody has contributed fiction and essays to most
major publications and has been widely anthologized. He lives
in New York.
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