Get the Feed
|
words | R E V I E W
Demonology
by Rick Moody by Paul McLeary
"The chicken mask was sorrowful, Sis,” says the more than mildly conflicted Andrew Wakefield before going on to describe, in embarrassing detail, how he lost his job trying to drum up business for a local restaurant, walking the streets wearing a sandwich board and chicken mask. So begins Rick Moody’s Demonology, his second collection of stories and his fifth book overall. The tragi-comic turn of the story ushers us into a strange but familiar suburban landscape in which most of the characters are just as conflicted about their place in a world where "lives are influenced by demographically calculating mass market fictions." It’s a world where an actress caught in the crossfire of a gunfight in a McDonald’s drive-thru thinks about how the story might be optioned and calculates her percentage of the gross while crouched in the back seat, shielding her daughter from the bullets. Given the backdrop of impending loss and the reliving of tragedy found in this collection, it’s no accident that the book is framed by two stories in which the narrator speaks to (or about) his dead sister. In the first piece, "The Mansion on the Hill", a young man whose sister was killed in a car crash on the eve of her wedding takes a job with what can best be described as a “wedding factory” - a large hall with a variety of rooms where guests hold theme weddings. The tacky and impersonal spectacle of this aspect of the marriage industry serves as a backdrop for the retelling of his sister’s death and how life has gone on without her - and how, in his own warped way, he plans to make things right. Despite many of the characters’ best intentions, precious little seems to go right. In "Hawaiian Night", a lonely, unmarried man attending a backyard party stops his narration to proclaim, “Here comes tragedy,” as he prepares to recount the events that have preceded the gathering of this group of well-off suburbanites. The tragedy in this case involves Debby Grimm, whose absence from the evening and from the Grimm family’s lives is like an ever-present cloud that hangs over them all. Debby was enjoying an outing on The Pretty Young Thing, the family boat, until it pitched its passengers into the water and then "embarked on its repetitive circular course, leftward, sinisterly” striking and killing her. Debby’s death has marked her family, singling them out from the rest of the community as the epitome of tragedy. During the party, the narrator nervously watches Debby’s children’s every move, fearful of more disasters, but ends the evening unhappily cleaning up the garbage with the rest of the adults. Though the Grimm family so far has managed to escape further catastrophe, throughout the 13 stories that comprise Demonology, tragedy is never far away. It surfaces repeatedly, affecting people who seem either unable or unwilling to change the hand they’ve been dealt. Despite this, the characters in this collection are not entirely without hope, and Demonology is, when taken as a whole, far from a morbid book. Moody has more than enough of a sense of humor to pull these stories off with wit and style; he doesn’t fall back on obvious sarcasm or stale armchair social analysis as other contemporary writers are prone to do. A good example of this is the story “Boys’, which chronicles the childhood of two brothers, each sentence outlining times when the boys walked through the front door of their parents’ house. The story quickly moves through their youthful hijinks right up to their college years and the eventual rift that develops between them, all without giving any real details of their lives or family history. Nevertheless, the story succeeds as more than a novelty - Moody is able to ascribe meaning to the mundane details just as "Wilkie Fahnstock: The Boxed Set" and "Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13" manage to expose their main characters by exploring the media that has shaped their thinking and development.
Perhaps the most fully realized piece in the collection is the novella "The Carnival Tradition" in which Moody plays with the life stories of two Hoboken, N.J. hipsters in 1985 - taking them from the almost botched launch of their art gallery back to a strange Halloween party 10 years earlier. What starts out as a riff on the theoretical eccentricities and pretensions of the underground art world evolves into a piece about rich and awkward adolescents, finally changing yet again and becoming a devastating reflection on the loss of love, the death of youthful dreams and the aftermath of a horrible accident.
Oftentimes Moody’s stories give the feeling of being a random selection of what seem to be distinctly American forms of violence and loss. Perhaps it’s because he is so rooted in the familiar - his characters often live just outside the great promise of prosperity and fulfillment, their lives dictated by ‘multinational entertainment providers’ where children dress up as ‘televised superheroes’ for Halloween. This world should be familiar to fans of his work, as it bears a striking resemblance to the middle class American neighborhoods of his novels Garden State, The Ice Storm and Purple America. Though similar in design, Moody continuously manages to find new ways to present the story of both the comfortably disaffected and quietly damaged, as well as those whose lives have been touched by some force or event they can’t quite overcome. One of the things that Moody is most successful at doing in these stories is avoiding the trap that so many other writers fall into when writing about the suburbs. Rather than simply (and obviously) rehashing the lazy and all-too familiar cliches of vast suburban tracts of fast food drive-thrus, 24-hour convenience stores and absentee boomer parents, Moody treats these things as just part of the natural landscape. His characters succeed in that he is able to expose the hidden pathos that exists in the most mundane circumstances and the most average places. Related Sites Click here to purchase Demonology from Politics and Prose |
