The Diviners

In pursuit of television's Next Big Thing, the key players in Rick Moody's new novel, The Diviners, go forth, powered by blind ambition. Yet by the nearly 600-page journey's end, they've made little real progress—not that it matters. This sprawling entanglement of characters—most of whom are vain, calculating and sexually frustrated—is profanely delightful.

At the story's center is Vanessa Meandro, a bellowing, oversized terror who runs an indie-film company. She sets out to launch a 13-part miniseries about dowsers (people who claim to "divine" the location of underground water or metal sources). Opening in ancient Mongolia, the show will follow the descendants of a diviner named Zoltan through every significant epoch up to latter-day Las Vegas.

But what Vanessa doesn't know is that the Diviners screenplay doesn't exist; the show is a hoax hatched by two of her underlings, one of whom, Thaddeus Griffin, is an adulterous, washed-up action-film star. But sit back and watch how fast our strivers hatch ideas for poster designs and merch tie-ins. All along, Moody concocts one absurdly funny scene after another, such as when Thaddeus asks a yoga instructor to let him drink her pee after she has bound his wrists and ankles in bow pose.

Along the way, everyone spews breathless soliloquies about the miniseries (Moody's a pro at such pedestal prattle). Big Stories, they lament, are refreshments sorely missing from the minibar in the reality-TV era; thirst is a Big Theme here. But will catharsis come for anyone in pursuit of The Diviners, or will they discover that it's a dry well? Moody never takes us there. Instead, he zooms around like a Jumping Jack firework in the frenzy of our go-go media culture, substituting a sequence of well-developed tangents for typical plot progression. The novel's end feels hastily laid, but this is one hell of a wild ride.—Susannah Felts