Books

Rick Moody was once called "the worst writer of his generation" by fire-breathing critic Dale Peck. Don't believe it, not that you would: He's a bold stylist and an adventurous storyteller with a wicked postmodern sensibility.

His latest novel, The Diviners, is a sprawling narrative, written in the voices of multiple characters connected to an epic miniseries proposal and a New York indie film company. One problem: The script doesn't exist.

We spoke with him on the phone before he left his home in New York to read at The Writer's Garret on Tuesday night.

Where did you come about such a satirical eye and ear for the independent film industry?

A lot of people labor under the mistaken belief that my book that was made into the movie The Ice Storm is sort of the subliminal text in The Diviners, and that I'm somehow getting even. The problem with that theory is that I had a great time with The Ice Storm. Great people were involved, including the director, Ang Lee. He's a really brilliant, supple, philosophically inclined reader. So that was a very blessed filmmaking experience for me.

I went to Brown University in the late '70s and early '80s, and they had a big, popular filmmaking program. A lot of the people who were there with me went on to make movies, including Todd Haynes [Far From Heaven ]. So I've managed over the many years since I got out of college to keep in touch with enough film people to have an idea about how it works.

How does The Diviners lend itself to the multiple narrator format?

After I got to thinking about how it was dependent on the notion of a miniseries as a television serial narrative, I started watching a lot of television shows. I don't actually have a TV, but when I was writing the book I decided I had to go back and look at all of these old miniseries like Roots and The Thornbirds. Then I also started watching some of the serial narratives that people watch now, like Six Feet Under. I got really interested in how each episode can be different from each other episode, and how the voice of each writer and the guest star really change the look and feel of each different episode.

So I decided that offered me an opportunity in the book to do a thing, to use a character's voice with the third-person limited point of view. That kind of structure is also native to me. I like collage-oriented things, and I like books that have a lot of constituent parts and different mysteries concealed here and there.

The novel is set during the tumult following the 2000 presidential election. Why did you decide to do that?

The time that I began the book was just after 9/11, and a lot of people were rushing to write 9/11 novels. I was really against that, and I still feel to some extent that you really need a period of reflection, historically and culturally, before fiction is ready to tackle certain things. You look at Vietnam, and arguably the best Vietnam book was The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, and that wasn't published until 1990, years after the fall of Saigon.

So I thought it would be more interesting to go back before 9/11, to the transitional moment, and look at that. That's a period that's been somewhat effaced by history. We talk a lot about the Bush administration, but we don't talk much about the contested election. We're really thinking about the Bush that we know now. It provided me with an opportunity to talk about the period that I think is obscured on the one hand by the gargantuan reputation of the Clinton presidency, and on the other by the George W. Bush post-9/11 presidency.

One of the characters in The Diviners is a caustic, show-off wine critic named Randall Tork. Is he based on the literary critic Dale Peck?

I wish I could be that scalpel-like in my intentions. I'm just not that kind of writer. I wouldn't use my novel as a device to get back at somebody. The chapter certainly takes a dim view of the state of criticism in general, and appropriately so. What used to pass as genuine attempts to evaluate art and culture have now become opportunities for newsmaking. If you can splash a grudge across your column, you can make a name for yourself. In that respect, Dale Peck is one among many. I never read the review, so I don't have a particular grudge against Dale Peck. But I do have a grudge against a notion in the reviewing community that people won't sit still to read carefully reasoned discussions of ideas as they are raised in books, movies or wine.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com

Rick Moody reads from The Diviners 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Theatre Three, 2800 Routh St., Dallas. $28-$34. 214-871-3300, option 1, or www.writersgarret .org.