Yeah, so, N came home with this book a couple months ago. "You want Rick Moody's new book?" he asked as he threw it on the coffee table. "Yeah sure," I sneered, preparing to hate it, looking with disgust at its cover. Because up to this point, I hated Rick Moody.

Dale Peck called Rick Moody the worst writer of his generation. That had to hurt. And in some kind of winking acknowledgement, Moody's chosen to set his new novel in the year 2000, right about the time when anyone gave a shit about what Peck had to say. Or what Moody had to write.

The Diviners is a big fucking book. It's 500 pages, with a muscular Mongol on the cover. It took me a while to realize that the cover was ironic. That must be why the publisher changed it. But I'm here to tell you: Don't be put off by the cover.

Also, don't be put off by the first chapter. This is what makes me the a priori dilettante: If I hate the first chapter, the rest of the book is ruined for me. I had to skip the first 50 pages of Empire Falls, and I *love* Richard Russo. So, a word to the wise guy: Skip the first chapter.

Because it's immaterial to the rest of the book. It's a metaphor for the grandiose scope of the book, sure, but it won't teach you anything you need to remember. Fully 79% of the book won't teach you anything you need to remember to enjoy the book, actually. That's what's so beautiful about The Diviners, and that's why I love it. The plot, to me, is secondary from the way the story is told.

A full synopsis of it would require more grafs than I'm willing to expend, but imagine it as a comedy of manners, a farce, a social satire, Moliere on crack. The premise: Vanessa Meandro runs an independent film company called Means of Production. She's a nightmare. Annabel, her assistant, has misplaced a script and so she tells her about a treatment that doesn't exist: A multigenerational miniseries about diviners, conceived of by the action-film actor who shares the Means of Production office, and with whom Annabel is sleeping. Vanessa's got problems: Her mom is a crazy Brooklyn-Italian drunk; she has food and security issues, and, as it turns out, her accountant is embezzling money. Meanwhile, Annabel's brother, a bipolar artist/bike messenger, is accused of attempted murder, a radical terrorist organization firebombs a Krispy Kreme, a wine critic falls in love with his AIDS-afflicted charge, and a Mary Higgins Clark-style writer hosts a disastrous Botox party. No, none of this has anything to do with anything.

Moody devotes a chapter to every person with whom Vanessa interacts, and a chapter for everyone with whom her people interact. There are some you love. There are also some you hate. And they're all fascinating, even if they do speak in a uniform voice. (Which some of his detractors call bullshit on. Me, I like the voice, so who cares that it's everywhere?)

Early on in the book, Vanessa meets a car service driver named Ranjeet who manages to wrangle his way into Means of Production as a master in the theory and practice of TV. He's one of my favorites, because he's permitted some of the funniest monologues, such as this:

"Reality programming....is a type of programming which comes from Europe. It is the revenge of Europeans on the American dramatic series. People perform crazy actions. They might perhaps eat a rat. Persons collaborate on the eating of rats, preparations for rats, which herbs to use. You might have a program about persons doing these things. You might perhaps find persons in a house together with a lot of money, and you could see who tries to find the money first, and the house has many rats in it. Or you could put people in a house together and one of thse persons is having sexual relations with another. What these programs lack is mythology."

Another peripheral character is Randall Tork, a gay wine critic with a poison pen who is clearly modeled after Dale Peck. Known to skewer even the meekest vintner (who knew how cutthroat the wine industry was?), Tork is famous for jeremiads such as

These wines are flabby in the way the cellulite bulges from the too-tight pouches of her nulliparous behind, they are fruity like the desserts tha are favored by the disadvantaged children that [actress Elke] Murnaugh and her never-to-be-mentioned partner tke into their house so that she can be photographed leering, like a wine taster, surrounded by her brood, on the covers of celebrity weeklies. These chardonnays have the mouthfeel of neglected vaginas begging beseechingly to be brought beseechingly out of retirement, musty, undeodorized, and sentimental.

I'd go on, but I'm bad at transcription. The point I'm trying to get across is that Moody is really fucking funny. Who knew? And don't we need more funny books? (As Moody puts it here, "I just got bored of trying to prove I was the smartest kid in the class (or maybe third-smartest), and just wanted to write the kind of book that I love reading.")

The Diviners is bloated and silly. It is vast; it contains multitudes. To its detractors, it might be the greatest maifestation of hubris since the Johnson administration. Nevetheless, I still think it's fantastic. I know this isn't the most cogent review. I can't help it, because I am overflowing with love for this beautiful, flawed book. Please read it. It is worth the $26. It is worth the backache.