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Outstanding
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Boston Globe Ann Harleman
"The Diviners" occasionally leaves us hanging. But this is a small price to pay for admission to such a wild, exhilarating, ultimately heart-opening ride.
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Outstanding
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Chicago Tribune Melvin Jules Bukiet
If one leaves "The Diviners" wishing it had been a few hundred pages longer, that's the kind of problem any writer should envy and any reader should relish. Hallelujah! [11 Sep 2005]
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Outstanding
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Washington Post James Hynes
If you prefer a more straightforward narrative, this might not be the book for you, but if you like watching the smartest kid in the room do his stuff, The Diviners is like a Broadway musical filled with nothing but showstoppers, as Moody performs one bravura set piece after another.
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Outstanding
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The Guardian James Flint
It's a measure of Moody's skill as a novelist that he analyses [the characters, the world and the entertainment industry] not with bitterness or spite but with generous humour and a deep humanity--and crafts a book of considerable beauty while doing it.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Mark Sanderson
Moody's hilarious satire re-establishes the primacy of the word.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Stephen Metcalf
I know of no more appropriate response to "The Diviners" than to say: it will make a fine movie.
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Favorable
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Houston Chronicle William J. Cobb
The parody is so extravagant that realism doesn't matter: His purpose seems to be to create a wild romp--comical, political and biting all at once.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Jane Ciabattari
It is clear that Moody has constructed a satiric masterpiece. Despite its flaws, "The Diviners" is an astonishing book. More Cirque du Soleil than Brecht, but dazzling nonetheless. [12 Sep 2005, p.E1]
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Linda Burnett
"The Diviners" may be aimed at an obvious target--Hollywood is an inherent parody, much like that election--but it pulls off being sardonic about the silly seriousness of pop culture, and it's penetrating in dissecting the characters' humanity.
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Mixed
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Guy Vanderhaeghe
As entertainment, The Diviners gives full value for money, but if "the light that illuminates the world" was meant to expose the present ills of American civilization, Moody sheds a lot more heat than light on the matter. [17 Sep 2005]
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Mixed
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Publishers Weekly
The book's end-of-Clinton-era setting and its relentless dissection of L.A.'s capitalist fantasy mentality reach toward summative critique of an era a la The Corrections. [1 Aug 2005, p.43]
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Mixed
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The New Yorker
Moody's novel, like the high-production-value shows it refers to, has an earnest sententiousness that overshadows its well-crafted fluency.
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Mixed
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London Review Of Books Christopher Tayler
It almost makes you wish he’d gone for glazed irony, because this time round, Moody seems a lot more comfortable behind the scenes of the televisual front people already jeer at -- the front they can already get behind the scenes of via Entertainment Tonight.
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Unfavorable
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Village Voice Phyllis Fong
The Diviners, its rhapsodies too forthcoming for its fallen world, and with ultimately obscure intent, would seem to make for bad TV.
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Siddhartha Deb
[A] tiresome novel that just might have been better off as a TV series.
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Unfavorable
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Flak Nate Wood
There is too little charity and sympathy, and far too much fascination with failures and shortcomings, for this to be homage of any sort. And the characters are a little too pitiful for us to laugh at without our amusement turning into ridicule, and our smiles into smirks. By ignoring those aspects of human nature that allow us enjoy each other, and to live with ourselves, Moody draws an especially bleak vision.
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Unfavorable
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The Independent Tim Martin
The prose bears all the marks of that ironical, geeky, clever-clever McSweeney's style that hovers like a plague of smug locusts over contemporary American letters.
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Unfavorable
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The Nation Christine Smallwood
You can only wonder what might happen if Moody applied his energy to crafting characters other than his narrators--which is to say, other than himself. The result might no longer be a Rick Moody novel. But it would make for much better reading.
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Unfavorable
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Entertainment Weekly Benjamin Svetkey
Despite all his offbeat plot twists and writerly pyrotechnics, Moody doesn't create a single character you care much about.
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Unfavorable
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Kirkus Reviews
A novel that might well have been more fun to write than it is to read. [1 Jul 2005, p.705]
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Terrible
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Bookslut Michael Schaub
At no point in The Diviners does it seem like Moody actually cares about this book, and why should he? Almost 600 pages, and there's really nothing to care about.
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