What the Public Most Wants to See 
Christopher Tayler
- The Diviners by Rick Moody
When he published The Ice Storm in 1994, Rick Moody seemed to be looking for a workable compromise between suburban realism and what Gore Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly accurate prophets and critics of the image-saturated world they’d grown up in. And R&D seemed so squarely aligned with politico-cultural ‘dissent’ that any dilution of the avant-garde formula was troubling to contemplate – especially if you were both Theory-trained and, in Franzen’s words, ‘one of those skinny young men in scary glasses . . . who look like they possess massive amounts of data about small-label rock bands’.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Other articles by this contributor:
But Little Bequalmed · Louis de Bernières’s Decency
Genderbait for the Nerds · William Gibson
High on His Own Supply · Amis Recycled
A Bit of a Lush · William Boyd
Belgravia Cockney · being a le Carré bore
print layout
tell a friend