Rick Moody Demonology.(Review)

Rick Moody Demonology. Little, Brown, 288 pages, $24.95

"Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find that he had been transformed into a cockroach" is no longer enough. What the thing needs is a corollary narrative about an estranged sister trying to escape the psychic scars left upon her by her suburban foster family. She dreams of cockroaches. Cockroaches infest her apartment and she squashes them. Critics would declaim: "Not since Lolita have we seen such a powerful metaphor for the collision of the Old World with the New."

"Forecast from the Retail Desk" a twenty-three-page story in Rick Moody's new collection Demonology, takes as a protagonist a man who believes he can predict the future. He's often wrong, but he is sometimes nearly right. Also in this story, a child has leukemia (we never meet the child, but the protagonist worries about him). A car accident cripples a high school enemy of our protagonist--the car was struck while the enemy was smooching his intergenerational gay lover. Someone tries to jump on a moving subway; he falls and is crushed. The train lurches to a stop, hurtling our protagonist into the lap of a stranger, a woman he later marries. His brother has a torrid one-night stand. The same brother shows up with a dented, and possibly stolen, Porsche with blood on the dash and seat. Our hero believes that his brother has accidentally killed his date and hidden her in a swamp and is now asking for help in covering it up. He is wrong, but they fight.

These stories are salvos of melodrama, strings of the improbable. We are presented situations in which the psyche would be rubbed raw, but we are left to imagine the ramifications, the nuances, the complexities. In the story "Drawer" a man has put his absent wife's armoire on the beach. Much is made of her having called what the man would refer to as a "dresser" an "armoire." His wife had kept the top drawer of the armoire locked. We find the nameless man standing with a crowbar, ready to "heat the house for days with the past tense of her." He's going to burn her diaries and the furniture. The story is an illustration of simple spite. Johnson wrote that writing is engaging when "new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new." Here, we have no new thing, and no fresh elucidation of the common. We have a retelling of Carver's "why Don't You Dance?" with enhanced spite and added violence.

Many consider Moody a very serious artist. He studied ...