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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Rick Moody talks about car crashes, why a man can't really know what it's like to be a woman and his new book, "Demonology."
Feb 5, 2001 | Seven car crashes, a subway smash, a propeller splice and dice, relationship meltdowns and a drive-by at McDonald's: Disaster seems inevitable in "Demonology," Rick Moody's newest story collection, a series of calamitous happenings. The saddest tragedy of all takes place in the title story, a wicked twist on All Saints' Day, the day after Halloween. A mother dies of a broken heart and her children are present to bear witness. Her brother mourns and ponders the significance of angels and evil spirits, including alcohol, while composing verbal snapshots of the snapshots that she left behind.
Dark and moody, yes, but don't despair. Humor is another Moody trademark. In a second story, sexual politics are brought to the table, literally, as a female academic, spread-eagled on the kitchen table, uses two shoehorns as a speculum to demonstrate to her cross-dressing boyfriend why he can never really know what it's like to be a woman.
Salon recently talked to Rick Moody to find out more about the demons behind "Demonology."
In the title story, the narrator talks about a "local news photo that never was: my sister slumped over the wheel of her Plymouth Saturn after having run smack into a local deer." In "The Mansion on the Hill," the narrator's sister is killed while driving to her wedding rehearsal. Two other stories have two collisions each, and in another three cars crash. What about car crashes intrigues you?
"Demonology" is the matrix story for all the other stories -- what it does for the book as a whole is generate a lot of calamity. After a while, the car crash ended up becoming the calamity above all others. It would just turn out that there was a car crash in every story even if I had not intended one at the outset. Like in "Boys" -- I had no idea there would be a car crash in "Boys." It's just a little one, but there it is suddenly, as an emblem for trauma.
Ever been in a car crash?
Little ones. I was in one the night Ronald Reagan was elected, in Providence, R.I. There were a bunch of us drinking and we were all really pissed off. We decided we were going to crash the Reagan celebration party at the Biltmore in downtown Providence, and we got in a car, somebody's used car. Four or five of us packed into this car. There's a red light by [the Rhode Island School of Design], where you go up the hill to go to Brown, a major traffic difficulty there on a good day, and we ran the red light. A car plowed into the side of this friend's car, but we were only going 35 miles an hour. No one was injured.
Part 2 of "The Carnival Tradition" takes place on Halloween, and so does "Demonology." "The Mansion on the Hill" starts with a chicken mask. "Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal" includes cross-dressing. What's the fascination with dressing up?
The masks are partly a reflection of the fact that this book was written while I was trying to finish another called "The Black Veil." Masking is the central image in that book. The two books simply started to overlap. As for Halloween, it's just something that I always loved as a kid. I like how much of the collective unconscious seems to swirl around on Halloween. Everything comes out onto the surface: Clinton masks, Monica masks. When I was a kid we always liked to dress as vagrants.
"Purple America" has an incredibly compassionate and liturgical first sentence -- one sentence for three pages, with "whosoever" beginning each new thought. In "The Mansion on the Hill," you use repetition and variations for more than a page and a half of continuous questions. And you employ the same technique in "Carousel," "Forecast From the Retail Desk" and "The Carnival Tradition."
I think those litanical passages have been some of my best work, and it's work that people really respond to. I don't want to overdo it, yet it comes really naturally to me. And I think that what comes naturally in the arts is something you have to fully investigate. The impulse obviously comes from music and it comes from biblical language. I just have to do it until I've done it so thoroughly that I can't do it anymore.
A lot of contemporary writing is cinematic in that its primary relationship is to what is observed, to how things look. And you know the writing school commonplace that you have to try to get the other senses into the story somehow. My orientation is really toward sound. I come at a lot of what I do as a frustrated musician. Sometimes I look at Nathan Englander stories or Allegra Goodman stories -- those great New Yorker realistic writers -- and I say, "Goddamn it, why can't I just behave and just tell a story like everybody else?" But as soon as my ear becomes involved in the act of storytelling, the musicality of prose comes to the surface. I'm trying to find a spot where I can do that and not go overboard and sound purple. That's what "Purple America" was about really, trying to go as far in that direction without seeming purple.
