Little, Brown

$24.95

ISBN: 0-316-58874-1

308 pages

I'm not a big fan of stories dominated by a BIG BAD EVENT. Stories in which, early on, a blood clot is found in the baby's diaper, or a daughter phones home to say, "Mom, I've been raped." From that point on in the story, you're basically dealing with the fallout of the BIG BAD EVENT (BBE). I'm sure there's a place in literature for this type of story, one which delineates how we come to grips with tragedies or near tragedies which disrupt our lives. Yet for me these stories seem to get their cues from television and its penchant for sensationalism. And though such stories appeal to our most basic instincts, I look to literature for something else. The use of BBEs feels like cheating, like an easy way to get the reader's interest. The BBE draws too much attention to itself; the act of writing is diminished.

Perhaps it's just me, but I prefer stories in which an event that may prove life-changing is more subtle. I like to think of writers as being gifted in the ways that identify and articulate the undercurrents of change in people's lives, the nuances that most of us are too insensitive, too hurried, too whatever, to see ourselves, and in reading such stories we become somewhat enlightened, our own perceptions heightened, and our lives enlarged.

There are many BBEs in Demonology, Moody's second collection of short stories. (He is also the author of The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven and the novels Purple America, The Ice Storm, and Garden State.) For his part, they don't often occur at the outset of a story, for which I'm grateful. Yet there are a plethora of them, enough to call attention to themselves. In "Carousel," an actress's Mercedes gets riddled with bullets at a McDonald's drive-thru; in "Forecast from the Retail Desk," a car accident paralyzes a classmate, and a second man gets run over by a subway train; in "The Mansion on the Hill," a sister suffers a fatal car crash prior to her wedding; in "Boys," a father's corpse is carried out of the house on a stretcher; not halfway through the "The Carnival Tradition," we've witnessed a dogfight, two car crashes, and a rape or attempted rape. I could go on.

The BBEs especially stand out in this last story, a novella about a New York dancer named M.J. and her boyfriend opening an (empty) art gallery out of their apartment in Hoboken. Locked out of her building, M.J. enlists the help of one of the locals and climbs to the roof, where her helper, whom she likes to think of as Angel (real name Mike), forces himself on her. The scene is written in the experimental style Moody has become known for:

— Stop, she said.

She pushed against him. He resisted. She pusher harder. He pushed back. She pulled away. He held on. She pushed again. He pulled away, holding on. He pushed back. She fell away. He held on. She pushed. He resisted. He pushed. She covered herself. She pulled away. She changed directions. He held on. She pushed against him. He resisted. She pushed. He resisted. She pushed, he resisted.

M.J.'s only comment soon afterward, to a friend who notices her disheveled state, is "A long story." Then it's on with the party. Like the rape scene, the other BBEs in this story seem to be thrown in because not much else is happening, and once they happen, there is little reflection about them.

Similarly in "The Carousel," both during and after getting caught in gang-related gunfire outside a McDonald's, Lily, an aging actress, is caught up in her own obsessions, including a mental image of a young blonde sitting on a baggage carousel during a commercial Lily made four years earlier in which she said the line, "It makes every other piece of luggage obsolete." For her the blonde symbolizes the young actresses taking her place, marking her own growing obsolescence. Yet it's hard to tell what effect, if any, the shooting has had on her.

Fast-food chains figure in "The Double Zero" as well, brought in at the end as the narrator claims that each generation's dreams of success get cheaper than the last:

...like for example all these dreams now feature Chuck E. Cheese (A special birthday show performed by Chuck E. Cheese and his musical friends!) or Cracker Barrel or Wendy's or Arby's or Red Lobster or the Outback Steakhouse or Boston Market or Taco Bell or Burger King or TCBY or Pizza Hut or Baskin Robbins or Friendly's or Hard Rock Cafe or KFC or IHOP or Frisch's Big Boy. Take a right down by Sam's Discount Warehouse, Midas Muffler, Target, Barnes and Noble, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Super Kmart, Nine-Nine Cent Store. My stand's at the end of the line. Fresh poultry and eggs. Eggs in this county they're the biggest darn eggs you've ever seen in your whole life.

Against a consumer capitalism run amok in America, Moody offers larger-than-life eggs, the offspring of a creative mind: "Hey, what's left in this breadbasket nation, but the mystery of imagination?" The anti-consumerism message doesn't run too deep, though. Mostly Moody just wants to tell a funny story (and it is pretty funny) about a family's ostrich farm and other failed ventures. If Moody had a more serious message, he might have fleshed out those dreams and gone beyond mere listing.

Besides listing, another of Moody's stylistic devices is the incredibly long sentence (also employed in Purple America). In fact, "The Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal" consists of one 16-page-long sentence. In this story Moody convincingly (at least to this male reviewer) conveys a woman's thoughts about her relationship, one which may be on the verge of ending following a four-margarita evening. Beneath the academic buzz words which the two characters use (e.g., she calls him a phallocrat), Moody is able to convey genuine emotion:

. . . if he could wear my skirt, he would understand how sad this was all making me, and this is why I was on the verge of tears, in the wood-paneled bar on the Upper West Side, though I refused to allow him to touch me as I cried, as I also refused to use tears strategically, they were just how I felt and I would not conceal it, they were a condensation and displacement, sure, but they required no action, and I was, it's true, a woman with a doctoral degree who believed against all reasonable evidence that there must have been some justifiability to the Western tradition of marriage, and who happened now to be crying, and who happened to be sad more often than not, who happened to have a striping of mascara on her cheeks, okay, but this only made him madder still, and there was a whole elegant spray of his logic about how feminine language undoes the proper meaning of words. . . .

Yet the final scene, in which the woman lays herself down on the kitchen table, spreads herself with two shoe horns and gives a clinical description of female anatomy, left me cold. The scene seems unnecessary, reaching for an effect. Still, this is one of the few stories in which a BBE doesn't loom large.

In two of the other better stories here, "Hawaiian Night" and "The Mansion on Hill," the BBEs seem more imbedded, more integral to the stories, so that a more subtle sense of emotion is conveyed, not overwhelmed by the size of an event. The former story concerns an annual summer affair at a country club. At the previous year's event, a club member, a mother of two, was killed in a water-skiing accident. At least in the eyes of the narrator, the event hovers over the present year's activities, with its calamari, its children lined up for ice cream, and its Caribbean music and limbo contest. The narrator fully expects one of the dead woman's children to crack his head open in the pool's shallow end. The limbo bar becomes a symbol for growing up, as all contestants eventually topple the bar. In the latter story the narrator grieves his sister's death, whom he addresses throughout the story. This story also succeeds because the BBE is in the background, in the past. We become involved with the narrator's actions, which are motivated by grief and guilt.

The last story in the collection, "Demonology," also deals with a sister's death, but far more directly. In fact, the story details the last day of Moody's own sister's life, who died in late 1995. The story has been much anthologized. A large part of the its appeal comes from the way it ends, as Moody breaks out of the fictional framework entirely:

I should fictionalize it more, I should conceal myself . . . I should make the events orderly, I should wait and write about it later; I should wait until I'm not angry . . . I shouldn't have to suffer; I should address her here directly (these are the ways I miss you), I should write only of affection . . . I should have a better ending, I shouldn't say her life was short and often sad, I shouldn't say she had her demons, as I do too.

Besides the effective, heartfelt ending, what makes the story succeed are the mass of specific details that build up to it—his sister's playing the guitar in the late sixties with her hair in braids, or her penchant for pogo dancing at weddings—so that her absence is palpable. Moody's own feelings of shock, grief, and loss come through the first 12 pages of the story, thereby giving meaning to the BBE that follows. This story most effectively shows that with or without a BBE, the tenets of good writing remain: attention to specific, meaningful detail, and how such events are felt by characters we are made to care about. By this last story I sense that the preponderance of BBEs in this collection represents Moody's way of coming to grips with tragedy. In Demonology, he's working out his own demons.