Writing As Recycling

By SAM SACKS

Rick Moody's "The Four Fingers of Death" is as much an encyclopedia of kitsch as it is a novel. The story takes place in 2025 in a dystopian United States that is halfway between Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano" and Woody Allen's "Sleeper." The narrator is Montese Crandall, a schlubby baseball-card collector and hack poet who is trying to support his wife as she receives medical treatment for her failing lungs. To this end he plays a Nabokovian chess match against a man with the Pynchonesque name D. Tyrannosaurus, attempting to win the opportunity to write a profitable novelization of the 1963 B-movie "The Crawling Hand."

With me so far? That novelization takes up the next 600 pages. It begins aboard a space mission to Mars, borrowing extravagantly from both Arthur C. Clarke and "Brokeback Mountain": "Do you never think of me?" asks lovelorn Col. Jed Richards to his fellow astronaut Jim Rose, who replies: "I wish there were some days when I didn't have to."

The mission goes haywire when Richards and Rose discover their onboard colleagues' covert plan to help the U.S. military by bringing back specimens of a flesh-eating bacterium. After much Ray Bradbury-inspired Martian warfare, Richards tries to return to Earth. But only his disease- infected arm lands intact, and it proceeds to crawl around and strangle people.

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The rest of the metanovel draws on countless horror conventions as well as Michael Crichton's intergalactic plague thriller "The Andromeda Strain." Mr. Moody even makes room for a talkative chimpanzee taken from Kafka's story "A Report to the Academy"; a scientist hoping to regenerate his dead wife à la Jeremy Leven's "Creator"; and other recycled diversions that, by this point, the beleaguered reader will be skimming past too rapidly to notice.

There's not one original thing in "The Four Fingers of Death," but what distinguishes it as a Rick Moody novel is its eagerness to compile its influences. (One of Mr. Moody's short stories is nothing but a bibliography with footnotes.) His prose obeys the same ethos of excess. He never uses one word when five or six will do. Tears, for instance, are "non-cybernetic tear duct effluent"; a sunset is the "aubergine tonalities of the post- technological evening"; a character is not lying, but his "English-language transmission was in the category of the patently untrue." Mr. Moody will write the same thing for four sentences, just in case you haven't caught the drift: "Three days now since Colonel Jed Richards had turned the video camera on a certain spot in the capsule that revealed absolutely nothing. An empty part of the capsule. A bank of onboard monitors. That was it."

And then there's this Comp 101 nightmare, ironically about the pointlessness of redundancy: "How had it grown so late? How had it grown so late? How had years of preparation and endlessly redundant plans come down to this? It had grown late while the Mars mission pondered, again and again, a list of possible responses without arriving at one it could collectively stomach, and now it was nearly too late." Let's all look at our watches.

It's no exaggeration that sentence-level editing alone would shear 200 pages from this 725-page novel, and that's the clue that "The Four Fingers of Death" is about circumlocution. Mr. Moody has written five novels and three story collections, and while his plots and settings vary wildly, the emotional fulcrum of his fiction has been sorrow over an ailing or dead loved one. A mother with a degenerative disorder dominates the 1995 novel "Purple America," and his most anthologized story, "The Mansion on the Hill," is haunted by the narrator's dead sister. That narrator at one point describes hearing "laughs that are next door over from a sob," a line that characterizes the best moments of Mr. Moody's fiction, when an inch of manic humor covers a bedrock of grief.

"The Four Fingers of Death" has a few such moving moments amid its verbiage. Montese Crandall projects onto his ridiculous novelization all the heartbreak and anger he feels about his wife's suffering. The lonely and abandoned astronauts, the declining civilization on Earth, the weird motif of severed limbs—all speak to despair. (Even the crawling hand is instilled with feelings of longing and incompleteness.) That's also the rationale for the novel's nearly pathological length. As long as Montese is spinning out his shaggy dog he can distract himself from the tragedy that is overtaking his life. Redundancy is his form of therapy.

If nothing else, "The Four Fingers of Death" provides further evidence for the inverse relationship between literary theory and literary quality. As a "project"—that's what the author calls the book in his acknowledgments—it succeeds; as a novel, it's harebrained and largely unreadable. Toward the end of the many Montese-written pages we've been reading, he admits: "I was not a very good writer." So Mr. Moody has written an intentionally second-rate book, in the idea that bad work, seen in an ironic way, is good. In other words: kitsch.

But kitsch requires a certain sincerity in its origins—this may be terrible, but we're trying hard and doing the best we can! If you watch the sublimely awful movie "The Crawling Hand" on Hulu, you'll see what Mr. Moody wants to reproduce. But he fails for a simple reason: insincerity. "The Four Fingers of Death" is calculated and self-serving. Mr. Moody knows the difference between a well-written, carefully edited paragraph and a sloppy, unedited one, and unlike the no-budget horror director, he could have made the superior product if he had worked hard enough. So the whole "project" stinks of a cop-out, of a gimmicky excuse to indulge bad habits.

In the most notorious book-review pillory of the past decade, Dale Peck branded Mr. Moody "the worst writer of his generation." It was hyperbole at the time, an attention grabber, but it's the sort of line that can easily turn into an epitaph. You'd think, then, that Mr. Moody would apply himself to writing novels that proved Mr. Peck wrong. Instead, with "The Four Fingers of Death" he has chosen to embrace the reputation.

Mr. Sacks is an editor of the online arts and literature review Open Letters Monthly.