Oh, man has invented his doom
First step was touching the moon
– Bob Dylan, “License to Kill”
In the “Epilogue and Scenes from Upcoming Episodes” to Rick Moody’s The Diviners (2005), Naz Korngold, CEO of Universal Beverages Corporation, meets with his “good buddy,” the “distinguished jurist” (a thinly veiled Antonin Scalia). Korngold, the jurist’s “special friend,” wants foreknowledge of the Bush v. Gore decision, so he can predict the reaction of the markets to the news, which will determine whether or not he should fire his senior VP of network programming. After Korngold gets his answer, the distinguished jurist has a show business question of his own:
“How do you end a story about God and country, though? That’s potentially a problem.”
“That’s easy. A story about God and country ends the way all good stories end.”
Availing himself of a theatrical pause, the special chum goes through the doors to where the limousine waits for him in the distance. Then the special chum’s voice sings out as he disappears into the night: “All good stories end with a fireball in the sky.”
I love this ending, and if I just ruined it for you, I apologize (but I do think five years is a long enough statute of spoiler limitations). It reminds me of that scene near the end of Adaptation., when Robert McKee (Brian Cox) says, “Don’t you dare bring in a deus ex machina,” unable to know that his character is filling exactly that role. But what is that fireball in the sky? Where is it? Judging by a random sampling of reviews, critics at the time seemed to think the book was all sky, no fireball. These critics were wrong, naturally, but here’s hoping they stayed tuned for what is not quite a sequel; rather, The Four Fingers of Death is a companion piece, a fellow traveler, if I may borrow a Moodyism. And a fine companion at that.
You may know by now that the novel takes place 15 years in the future, that it makes use of a framing device and a quasi-reliable narrator, that the bulk of its 729 pages is a novelization of a remake of the 1963 B-movie The Crawling Hand, and that it involves paling salons, a Mars shot, baseball cards of cyborg players, the infectious agent M. thanatobacillus, a thoughtful and articulate chimpanzee, an automated sex toy called the Pulverizer, and a global mercantile system dominated by the Sino-Indian Economic Compact. If this is all you know about the book, well, don’t you want to read it already? It’s dedicated to the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, and, length aside, Rick Moody does a good job channeling the master. There’s also more than a little Pynchon and, along the lines of “The Albertine Notes,” a good dose of Philip K. Dick. While The Diviners showed America at a precarious moment in its history (and blissfully unaware), The Four Fingers of Death shows the bitter harvest that may be the legacy of that moment.
Granted, the satirist always runs the risk of being outpaced by current events. Colonel Jed Richards tells us he has “a half-dozen sentences, preselected by a NASA subcommittee on first utterances” for use the moment his boots hit Martian ground. This would be pitch-perfect comedy, if only the Chinese government hadn’t beaten Moody to the punch. In September 2008, the Shenzhuo 7 was still sitting on the launch pad when the Xinhua News Agency ran a story from two days hence, complete with the astronauts’ dialog during the as-yet-unrealized first Chinese space walk. But does this occurrence spoil Moody’s future world? Of course not. In fact, it would be perfectly natural for the future USA to use a dirty trick employed by China 17 years prior. (On the other hand, the recent Time cover story about an English-using bonobo makes this reader think the talking-chimp breakthrough will happen some time before 2026….)
As Clancy Martin argues in The New York Times Book Review, this would make a finer comic novel if it were a bit less jokey. Moody has tons of wit, obviously, but when he’s just being witty, it tends to fall flat. When things are truly zany, like in the Burning Man-esque “omnium gatherum” set piece, or in the two excellent scenes of bad sex, the book is ecstatically funny. Which reminds me—I haven’t told you what I love about this book. I love the little idiosyncrasies that identify this work as pure Moody: words like hydrophobia, menarche, modality; the italics, for that matter; the first name Tara, and the surname Richards; I love the insistence on the superiority of Mexican Coke over domestic; the bitter reminder that the Mars mission originated from “a halfhearted boast by a less-than-mediocre president nearly a quarter century ago”; I especially love the extended stretches of parallel structure that should seem like a cheap trick by now, and would, were they not so damned great; and I love how Tyrone Duffy has improbably survived the upheavals of the near future to reemerge in Rio Blanco under an assumed, and awesomely ridiculous, name.
And I love that, as all great stories do, this one ends with a fireball in the sky. Spoiler alert.
