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Rick Moody is probably the most divisive member of the last generation's Important White Male Novelists, a group that includes Jonathan Franzen and the Daves, Foster Wallace and Eggers.
On one hand, Moody is the author of a Pushcart award-winning novel, Garden State, and the critically acclaimed The Ice Storm. On the other, he was the subject of an infamous literary curb-stomping by Dale Peck, who in a 2002 called Moody "the worst writer of his generation."
After reading Moody's new novel, Hotels of North America (Little, Brown and Company, 198 pages, $25), I find myself somewhere in the middle: Moody is a fine writer with a mind perfectly suited for the production of memorable one-liners, such as when the pompous and overly literary narrator of the book, Reginald Edward Morse, asks, "Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a fetal ball?"
If you're already a Moody fan, you'll find plenty to like in this book. If you're not, you may find that Hotels overextends itself on a flimsy criticism of Internet culture that is unrealistic.
Hotels is written as a series of motel reviews that sneak in a non-chronological biography of Reginald, the author of the reviews.
Despite Reginald's oddly formal diction, we are asked to believe he is one of the most well-read and -paid reviewers on the fictional RateMyLodging.com, a sort of Yelp for hotels.
It's worth noting that these reviews are of hotels like the Days Inn in Jackson, Tenn., in which Reginald goes on lengthy confessional digressions. (He writes about having sex with a woman on her period, and his methods for conning hotels for free services.)
No website would pay for these reviews because they are not very useful to travelers. If Reginald could publish them, he'd have his job and testicles handed to him in a sack by a Twitter mob.
And yet Moody writes Reginald not as being exceptional in, but rather emblematic of Internet culture, showing it to be pompous, arrogant, and having suspect credibility and zero self-awareness. Moody writes about the Internet with as much insight as Franzen or Tom Wolfe writes about college-aged women.
Maybe this book would have worked 20 years ago, when the Internet wasn't quite so intertwined with everyday life. But today, it feels like Moody isn't so much critiquing culture from a prophetic remove as remaining willfully ignorant of its progression.
GO: Rick Moody is at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., on Wednesday Nov. 18. 7:30 pm. Free.
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