Call If You Need Me and Demonology
One of Demonology's blurbers describes Rick Moody as a writer who is "swinging for the bleachers." Right! And along with the homers come an unusual number of rally-killing whiffs and embarrassing, boo-inducing double plays. One winds up marking the margins of a Moody book with: "Perfect!" ... "Awful!" ... "Perfect!" ... "Awful!" ... To my mind, the home runs are the two novella-length stories ("The Mansion on the Hill" and the "The Carnival Tradition," the second half of which is a near-masterpiece), "Boys," and "Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set." The strikeouts: "On the Carousel," "Forecast from the Retail Desk," and "Pan's Fair Throng." The others are either qualified successes or qualified failures. In light of that list, I don't think one can simply be a Carverian purist (realism good, trickery bad) on the matter of Moody's gimmicks. "Boys" and "Fahnstock" are two of the most tricked-up stories in the book; "Carousel" may be the most "realistic."
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StumbleUponLet's take a home run, "The Mansion on the Hill," which concerns that Moody archetype: the introspective man of potential reeling from what used to be called a "nervous crisis," the once-promising loser returned home. Andrew Wakefield, whose sister just died in a car crash on the eve of her wedding, is working as a fried-chicken mascot--a beautiful device that allows him to see, incognito behind his rubber mask, a long-ago heartthrob with her son. Said heartthrob gets him a job at the eponymous wedding and party-catering center. Here's a piece of realistic narrative to describe it: "It goes without saying that the Mansion on the Hill wasn't a mansion at all. It was a homely cinderblock edifice formerly occupied by the Colonie Athletic Club." Perfect! Now here's a gimmick, aimed at showing what it was like to work there. "Remember that footage, so often shown on contemporary reality based programming during the dead first half-hour of prime time, of the guy who vomited at his own wedding? I was at that wedding." Again, perfect!
At the mansion, Andrew works for Glenda Manzini, marketer of matrimony. In a perfectly imagined scene, he breaks into her office to find unused wheels of birth control pills in her file cabinet: She's been ostentatiously sending him out to pick up her refills in order to pretend she has a sex life. Gimmick or realism? It gets harder to tell. Watching a dozen marriages every weekend, Andrew becomes (that other Moody archetype) a reactionary who doesn't quite realize it: "By 3 p.m., I no longer knew what marriage meant, really, except that the celebration of it seemed built into every life I knew but my own." The words are perfectly straightforward, and they're addressed to Andrew's late sister, which makes them perfectly gimmicky. And the two mesh perfectly.
The climax comes when pompous Brice McCann, who was to have married Andrew's sister, is scheduled to marry at the Mansion after insufficient mourning. Andrew obtains his sister's ashes (the story, it turns out, is addressed to her as an elaborate apology for borrowing them) and dumps them on the groom during the ceremony. Naturally, Andrew gets dressed down by Glenda Manzini: "... I think you have some serious choices to make, Andy, if you want to be part of regular human society, and so forth, which is just plain bunk, as far as I'm concerned. It's not as if Brice McCann were a stranger to me." What's beautiful about this surreal-seeming exchange is that Andrew's right and Glenda's wrong! The internal logic of the narrator's obsession just builds and builds!
But even in this superb story, Moody can get lost in his own rhetorical pyrotechnics. The effects he's striving for appear over his head--which they are certainly not. Andrew declaims "stentoriously that Death Comes to All." (Does he mean "stertorous" or "stentorian"? Stentor is a loud character in the Iliad. You can't speak stentoriously any more than you can spend gatsbiously or marry bovariously.) He complains of "how marriage is just a shrink-wrapped sale item, mass-produced in bulk." (As opposed to what? Mass-produced by hand craftsmen?) He glances "desultorily around the screen." (How do you do that?) The most probable diagnosis for the sloppiness is Moody's mistaking his narrator's "voice" for his point.
Moody is frequently hilarious. It's when he's observing real people keenly--like the Yacht Club kid Marilyn Wendell in "Hawaiian Night," "who would almost certainly get as stout as her mom, and like her mom, be the consort of all local boys until that day"--that one feels one could read him by the shelf-full. But when he's in his "delight-in-the-play-of-language" creative writing mode, as in "Pan," the result is meaningless bloviation and a 3 a.m.-style loss of perspective on whether he's being funny or not: "Next, the town gossip, Mudge, afflicted with a peculiar ocular condition known among chirurgeons as wall-eye, as with a smart additional set of bicuspids, this Mudge strode, all inflated as when the peacock in thick of venery attempts to impress his mate ..." Who cares?
You're right that both Carver and Moody are "answering the intimation that the tools we have for making sense of and communicating experience are untrustworthy and prone to error." But surely every fiction writer since Richardson has known this. You do the best with what you have. Moody's brilliance lies not just in the world he evokes, in the elegiac way he is capable of evoking it--the "mood" of his fiction. It's worth going to Nabokovian lengths (resorting to "gimmicks," if you will) for that mood. Moody knows he's writing about something real, serious, desperately important. It's only when he tries to pretend otherwise and resorts to those "distancing strategies" you speak of that the gimmicks become a problem.
Best,
Chris
This week, our critics look at the grand old man of short fiction and a popular younger author. Click here to buy Call If You Need Me, by Raymond Carver; here for Demonology, by Rick Moody; and here for an explanation of our format. 
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Defenders of Carver were out in force, here, and here (plus advice on why not to read single-author short story collections) and here. Nice thread comparing Carver with Bukowski here: "For the record, Bukowski is just as awful a poet as Carver". Why is mediocre genre fiction so much better than mediocre literary fiction? Follow the thread here.]
Indeed, Carver's work generally involves working-class characters, often trapped in depressing lives. I don't see this as a limitation to his work, however. In the first place, I think that you're quite wrong to claim that the underrepresentation of blue collar America in our fiction is a fallacy. How many pre-Carver fiction writers can you name who address this substantial part of our population? However, to me your point is moot anyway. Do we fault Fitzgerald for his interest in upper class whites? Wright for his focus on poor blacks? Faulkner? Hemingway? Your supposed "limitation" has dismissed almost every major American writer. I would counter that Carver's work, like that of his contemporaries in the American canon, crosses boundaries of gender, race and socio-economic class. I may be a young, single man occupying the upper-middle class, but I can feel the marital desperation in Neighbors, and the adolescent confusion of Nobody Said Anything.
To say that Carver's work is limited by negativity of subject/mindset is again a misinformed assertion. I agree that much of Carver's published work is rather bleak--particularly the stories published in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. However, this negative tendency is more the legacy of Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, than of Carver himself. After Carver finally rejected Lish in 1984, his work grew in scope and sensitivity with the publication of Cathedral. When freed to write as he wanted to, Carver opted for the optimistic over the bleak.
Carver is hardly limited by his style--to me, his sparse language fits the oftentimes sparse lives of his characters. Carver employs what Hemingway called the "iceberg technique," submerging 9/10 of meaning beneath the surface of his language. This does not imply that meaning is not there, but simply that it is submerged. This may take more work for us as readers, but I ultimately prefer Carver's taut writing to the flowery language to which too many writers are subject. To me, Carver is a model for what it means to be careful and selective in one's writing; it seems fitting that he is perhaps the most imitated writer in creative writing courses across the country
--Dan Hatfield
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[Caldwell and Scott] both seem to agree that Carver's confinement in his fiction to a single social class, and to a limited range of subjects within that social class, constitutes a serious flaw in his writing. Certainly he is not, as Christopher complains, either Balzac or Jane Austen. But neither of them is prized as a writer of short stories. Aren't short stories by nature limited in scope? Do we find greater scope in the short stories of Chekhov, Gogol, Joyce, or John Updike? Don't we value them precisely for their skill in penetrating and revealing a narrow world?
--Howard Helsinger
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Scholarly recognition is what keeps pretty much all non-current literature alive. It's not just Ring Lardner or Hemingway. Nobody would read Goethe or Balzac if they had not been included in somebody's canon. As a librarian, I can tell you that your average reader reads current popular, genre fiction. The classics, the semi-classics and the would-be classics of yesteryear are read on assignment.
--Lieselotte Buecher
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