An Interview with Rick Moody

Rick Moody was one of the contemporary authors who attended 2022’s William Gaddis Centenary Conference to give a reading from Gaddis’s work. Rick’s reading and talk offered an animated and entertaining take on a passage from A Frolic of His Own, as well as a personal account of how he played a minor role in Frolic’s publication. It is clear that Moody has had a long and meaningful relationship with Gaddis’s work.

The following interview expands on what he shared at the conference and elaborates on his discovering Gaddis as an undergraduate at Brown University; how writers like Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Russell Banks shaped his voice; and how he himself has learned to synthesize postmodern innovation with emotionally accessible storytelling. This conversation has been edited for brevity and cohesion.

Jacob Singer: Tell me about discovering William Gaddis as an undergraduate at Brown University?

Rick Moody: Brown had a pretty great writing community in those days. I was in a workshop instructed by John Hawkes, a player in the late ’60s experimental writing crowd. That workshop featured Jeff Eugenides and Cary Twichell (younger sister of the poet Chase Twichell) as well as a number of other tremendously promising writers. Everybody kept taking the class because it was so rewarding, was such a community, and in time it became a crew of highly motivated undergraduate writers. We were reading all the stuff that you would think we were reading. Hawkes was really into Nabokov and everyone was reading a lot of those novels. Bend Sinister, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and so on. Jeff and I both read Ulysses and we talked about it a lot. I was sort of obsessed with Beckett.

And we always had an ear tilted in the direction of: what was the really cool, recondite thing that nobody knew about? I was not usually the person who knew first, rather the person who then consumed, but there was this friend of Jeff’s and mine named Cynthia. She was a painter and was absolutely the person who always knew what the really cool thing was. She was involved with someone from Harvard who later became an eminence in the independent publishing world and that person was constantly feeding Cynthia these incredible finds.

I’m pretty sure it was Cynthia who first told me to read Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles which was a very important book for me—still a big book for me! My recollection is that Cynthia was the one who said, “Hey, there’s this book that came out in the ’50s. It’s not like anything else and you should have this on your radar.” My recollection is that Jeff told me about Cynthia’s recommendation and so then everybody in this group of highly-motivated undergrads dipped in and there was this whole onslaught of discussion about the fifty-page party scenes and so on. I was fired up for The Recognitions having loved Ulysses, so pretty much right at or after I graduated in the summer of ’83 I took my first prolonged stab at this book.

It was just as great as I was told! That heavy Puritan vibe at the beginning was really attractive to me, because I was fixated on Hawthorne and writing from New England, but also the density of hermeneutic encoding with all the symbolism, and especially the theme of plagiarism and the idea of “the fake versus the original” as an orienting dialectic for the work as a whole. That was all stuff that I could understand and which was very exciting to me at the time, especially owing to the popularity of continental philosophy at Brown in those days.

There was canonical workshop writing from that period, like [Raymond Carver’s] What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and I remember talking with Hawkes about Carver and conceiving of minimalism as a postmodernism of a kind, a commentary on literary language. I liked that work because of how clever the word choice was. But The Recognitions was way off that sort of whole narrative of what’s good for the writing workshop. It wasn’t a book that workshop writers read, except maybe in our workshop. For me, it was the unlikeliness of it in a writing workshop setting that was part of why the book was so exciting. It was anti-canonical in that sense.

JS: Tell me about how you played a role in purchasing A Frolic of His Own.

RM: I’d read Carpenter’s Gothic, which is still the one I can’t make any headway with—because it’s so dark—but around ’87 I finally decided to try to read J R, and I had just an incredible experience with it—it was one of the great reading experiences of my life. And there are five such reading experiences that I could name along similar lines: The Brothers Karamazov, the Beckett trilogy, Ulysses, J R, and Moby Dick. Oh, wait, here’s a sixth: Don Quixote. Oh, wait, what about the Icelandic sagas? Anyway, I loved reading J R—it was like reading books when I was twelve, in the sense that I would refuse food and water and social interaction so I could sit and continue reading it, and I think it was that the book was so funny that kept me rooted in place. I didn’t really have trouble with the unattributed-dialogue aspect of it because the voices were so operatic that I could hear them, could hear the people, and so I finally read J R and had this sort of revelation or awakening of J R, and it wasn’t that long after that I read that passage of Frolic in The New Yorker for the first time.

At that time, I worked for Allen Peacock at an imprint at Simon and Schuster, the Linden Press, housed in an unlikely superstructure for such a highly literary imprint. Allen had somehow managed to land Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Fredrick Barthelme, and T.R. Pearson, and others—a lot of really great writers. He got them all in improbable ways, but bit by bit he’d cornered the market in a certain kind of innovative fiction from that time. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that he would sign Gaddis, not at all, but on the other hand it was somewhat probable based on his interests. And yet perhaps he wasn’t thinking about it in the same way I was. I was opening literary magazines looking for signs of what Pynchon was doing, you know, waiting for [what turned out to be] Vineland like it was written on a stone tablet and was going to come down from above. That’s all I was thinking about. It was all I cared about: What were these renegade writers up to and when were we going to see more?

So when I saw Gaddis’s piece in The New Yorker, I surmised that he had something he was working on, so I thought we should just go out big! At least this is how I was going to sell it to Allen Peacock. Who cares if you overpay, because it’s William Gaddis! Soon after Al went to Gaddis’ agent Candida Donadio. Allen’s boss was Joni Evans, who was married to Dick Snyder, the CEO of Gulf and Western—who owned Simon and Schuster. From what I was told, there was this ripple in the backdrop about the decision to buy Frolic. People were asking Snyder, “Um, Sir. Do you want to do this thing?” Which was to overpay significantly for a literary book. It appeared that the purchase represented a kind of a tip of the hat with respect to Snyder’s wife’s little imprint. His response, as I understood it from the rumor mill, was something like, “I don’t know what it is, really, but it’s all right if we overpay for it.” So they paid what would have been a great deal by Gaddis’ standards.

I remember [Candida] Donadio, his agent, said something like, “Willie has never had money like this before.” He’d never had an advance of any significance. Both the first two books were published into something like neglect. So, anyway, the Linden Press overpaid a bit. I don’t know exactly how much, but like six figures, which was a ton for that time. So they got the book. And then Al left—he got fired or edged out or something, probably for being too literary— and I went to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Frolic got inherited by Ann Patty who had the Poseidon Press imprint. And she published it. That’s how it happened. Perhaps I was the first person who said I bet there’s a book, and then I just got to have a ringside seat, as one does when one is an editorial department flunky.

JS: Can you share the story of what happened to the manuscript?

RM: This is what Allen told me, later on, so I assume he was still there when they delivered the manuscript, but before it was finished and published. It is said, according to the rumor, that Gaddis FedExed the finished manuscript to Simon and Schuster. The backdrop of course is that this is the time when the manuscript was really a manuscript, probably a typescript in Gaddis’ case, because he was still working on typewriters. There was the one manuscript.

He sent the manuscript trusting that FedEx was a reliable force, which they mostly were. I guess he assumed they would photocopy it when it landed finally at Simon and Schuster. I’ve heard outrageous stories like this about Roth and insane anxiety about the one-and-only manuscript. Manuscripts in the freezer, in case of fire, and so on. Many writers felt obsessive about the object, with good reason. Now Dick Snyder comes back into the story, because Poseidon had spent a lot of money on the Gaddis manuscript. Fed Ex, I mean, lost the manuscript.

As Al told the story to me, Snyder called FedEx and said something like, “You know Gulf and Western has done X number of dollars’ worth of business with you in the last five years. The tap is about to run dry unless you find that manuscript.” And FedEx moved heaven and earth to find it, Gaddis’s Frolic. There was silence for a day or something and then suddenly the manuscript appeared and was much distressed and trod upon and mangled and dog-eared. It was all there—except for the last page.

The story is that Gaddis reconstructed the last page of Frolic from memory.

JS: Is this story well known or did you break this story for the first time at the conference?

RM: I don’t know! Maybe I broke the story! Allen Peacock certainly knew the story and told it to me. It’s not like Steven Moore came up to me afterward, at the conference, and said, “Oh, my God. I’ve never heard that.” So it’s possible that the story is out there and that other people just don’t find it as revealing of those times as I do, or maybe because I have this adjacency to the manuscript and its coming-into-being. Literature used to be made out of these physical objects, not a sequence of ones and zeroes. And people can become highly neurotic—with good reason—about unique physical objects.

JS: Frolic parodies the legal system, J R parodies capitalism, and The Recognitions takes on art and bohemia. So many of these themes are present in your novel The Diviners. What do you see as the associations between The Diviners and Gaddis? How do you see that kind of literary maximalism coming through you and into The Diviners?

RM: In my recollection, the book wherein people said I sounded like Gaddis was Purple America. Sven Birkerts, my acquaintance and a great and important literary critic, said he thought Purple America had echoes of Carpenter’s Gothic, which is ironic because that’s not the one I like best. Carpenter’s Gothic is like the Ice Storm and Purple America in that those works are both essentially Aristotelian dramas with the unity of place and time. That’s sort of the methodology. In Carpenter’s Gothic and J R, to some degree, there is the endless “now” of a theatrical structure.

There was never a time when I thought, “Oh, you know there are aspects of Gaddis that I’m going to imitate,” because he seemed inimitable, especially the dialogue-heavy period because it’s really about how your ear tunes to the dialogue, to the human voices, and that’s his own thing—the way those characters talk—that’s Gaddis’ thing. It’s so hard to sound like him as a stylist. I just don’t know how I would. I never set out to sound like him, but it may be that what influenced me was this Gaddis idea of The Recognitions and J R that you could somehow try to take a snapshot of the intricacies of culture as a whole. The web of references. That’s the thing that I wanted to do and maybe I really wanted to do it in those two comic novels The Diviners and The Four Fingers of Death. Maybe those books in a way share the kind of panoptical quality of Gaddis to some degree.

JS: The miniseries in The Diviners seems to parody encyclopedic narratives that attempt to include every last detail and that are structured to connect all the details in new sort of non-Aristotelian cohesion. What were you reading or studying to help design that structure? It reminds me of postmodernists like Gaddis, Barth, and Pynchon.

RM: I love Pynchon and you know you can get into some kind of weird internecine combat among postmodernists wherein it seems you either have to like Gaddis or Pynchon, but I never felt that way because I liked both. For me with Pynchon, it was The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, the latter of which is an unassailable Holy Grail for many writers of my generation.

At one point, I remember there was this rumor that Pynchon was writing these weird letters to the editor of a little weekly in Northern California, and I remember calling David Foster Wallace and asking, “Is this Pynchon? Do you think he’s actually doing this?” There was sort of this pause and Wallace said, “Pynchon was never really that important to me.” So shocking to me because I really felt like so strongly about Pynchon. I thought every writer my age felt that way! Gravity’s Rainbow and The Recognitions and J R were a holy trinity of books that I wanted to try to get near to, to try to get to a more maximal design. I wanted something that had that comic energy the way Gaddis and Pynchon had comic energy. There were other writers too, like DeLillo who is really important to me. Wallace said it was DeLillo that he cared more about. I remember him once, at a dinner of younger writers of the nineties, reciting the opening of DeLillo’s Americana, and if I remember correctly that was when it was out of print.

JS: The Diviners consists of chapters that initially feel disconnected but eventually merge into something cohesive. Overtimes these links move to create a unified picture with a wide range of interconnected characters. Did you develop this structure during the brainstorming process, as you were writing, or during the revision phase? I’m always curious about the writer’s process when structuring something that is beyond Aristotelian plot, as you described earlier.

RM: When I was writing that book, I was in a period—this is going to sound so low and anti-literary, but it’s true—I was in a period of really loving television. The overall meandering structure of that book was based on this haphazard structuring of serial narrative in television programs. And it’s why the protagonist’s last name is “Meandro.” That idea was built in, that the structure was meant to meander in exactly the way a television show meanders over the course of the season when it has twenty-five different writers, and the show runner has a shitty idea and then abruptly decides to go in another direction. It was meant to ape a kind of television structure, therefore, in particular certain shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it was also the period wherein The Sopranos started broadcasting. This idea of really extruding a narrative way out over a long period of time and allowing improvisation and discovery to take place along the way that was sort of the idea for the book. It kind of goes back to Gravity’s Rainbow and its relationship to the I Ching, so that’s not a left-field metaphor but it’s an attempt to actually describe how incident and changes in setting and changes in point of view work in Gravity’s Rainbow and in other maximalist books. I wanted to preserve that highly improbable, eruptive way of moving forward in The Diviners and to fuse that with this way that very large narrative structures work over the course of television shows that were years in the unfolding. That was the model.

JS: The book synthesizes epic mythology and reality in a really interesting way. It feels both like Aaron Sorkin and reality television or cable news. It feels both overly dramatic and mundane. Were you looking to blend the high art of ’90s dramatic series and low-brow reality shows?

RM: That’s exactly the idea. The same kind of precepts that worked with Four Fingers of Death, really. I dedicated that later book to Kurt Vonnegut, a huge influence for me, because I was trying to note that lamentable tendency of high-literary writing to look down on popular culture. I wanted with both Diviners and Four Fingers to have both things: I wanted to have high art and I wanted to have low art. It was partly because of reading Pynchon and Beckett, because Beckett always has low scatological humor and silent-film tendencies mixing with the astonishing prose. Beckett was really moved by Chaplin and Keaton, and I too wanted to leave open this idea that I could be animated by these things, by the idea that literature can preserve a love of popular art and not see it as antithetical to what we do.

JS: This brings back the conversation that you raised early on which is this idea of canonical writing regarding minimalism and maximalism. One of the things that I’ve been wrestling with is what I like and dislike about certain maximalist writers. Infinite Jest is one of those texts that rewards the reader on the level of the sentence, whereas Pale King is pushing this kind of exhaustion and boredom that feels 180 degrees from Jest. I also think about William Vollmann and William Gass. At times I am blown away by them but there are other times that really challenge me. I can feel them really pushing me. The beginning of The Tunnel can be brutal. It’s so dense. Can you share some of your guiding principles on how you manage challenging and rewarding readers?

RM: Russell Banks, a teacher of mine who has just passed away, has been on my mind this week. Banks was really important to me in grad school. He was a thesis reader for me, and was a really important positive presence at Columbia University, a time when I really thought I didn’t have it as a writer. Partially, it’s because the Carver legend, so popular at the time I was in grad school, was something I could admire but not practice myself. I was never going to be working-class minimalism, dirty realism, and that became abundantly clear in workshop at Columbia University and people let me know.

Banks was really like a lone voice for me in grad school, saying, “Hey, this thing that you’re borrowing from the iconoclasts is good, and it’s cool, and you should continue to try, and don’t panic but buckle in.” He got me through a difficult time. In thinking about Banks in these last months when he was really ill and then since he died, I see him as sort of a representative of a mixed reaction to maximalism, as a maverick on the subject. In specific, his novel Continental Drift—which preserves some experimental part of his practice that dated back to when he was a featured voice in the Fiction Collective and knew all these people, knew Robert Coover—also has an eye on what story is, why story is emotionally satisfying, how a story can do things for the audience that sometimes mere chops (or mere bile) cannot do.

I’ve had the same problem with The Tunnel you have had. I read the manuscript because Allen Peacock was going to try to buy it, so we had the manuscript, and I felt like the problem for me was that however great the writing was (and it’s really remarkable, line by line) it only had one emotional note. I had that feeling from the first. I, for one, like his essays better than the fiction. So I’ve had problems with some of these books of the innovative period of postmodernism. They are not emotionally rich to me. They repudiate affect, human emotion, sometimes. They seem to assert that any affect is sentimental, which I take real issue with. That formulation leaves out a motive for which many people read.

I tried to put a stake in the ground having to do with emotional accessibility; in my work there’s still going to be all these ideas about structuring, the role that formalism can play in novel-making, but I also want the emotions to be right at hand—in the same way that Joyce has these amazingly powerful moments of poignancy, of the transcendental. I wanted to preserve that. Maybe that means that I am cast off from the team, I hope not.

Russell was one of the voices that created this path for me. He provided this route to thinking about the sheer joy of storytelling and the way that story creates a natural relationship with the emotional field. The human emotions are why we’re here.

JS: This gets to a challenge in creative writing pedagogy. Many of these writers, or other innovative writers, are not being read or taught. And I am not saying that one needs to teach a thousand-page novel. But there might be a really important lesson in an innovative text to see that there isn’t an emotional entry point for the reader. Or studying what is pulling the reader through the text—experimental language or emotional connection to characters.

RM: Maybe it’s a false dialectic but in the present moment it would be easy to observe that line-by-line craft has sort of been pushed off the syllabus as representation-questions have been brought to the center. I like a lot of contemporary books that are forcefully concerned with representation. For example, Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s The Evening Hero is a book I like a lot. It’s supremely smart and put together. Ocean Vuong is a great writer. I admire Min Jin Lee’s work a lot. I admire Ha Jin greatly, and so on. I’m very much looking forward to Colin Channer’s epic novel-in-verse that he’s working on. I think it’s possible to do these things together, address the prose line by line and address representation. The best contemporary work does that. But I was trained up by thinking about paragraphing and word choice and I still teach those things, and a virtuosity of paragraphing and word choice is still evident in the maximalists. So I don’t know why they should fall off the syllabus, if that has been what is happening. Maybe they were never really on the syllabus in the first place, not in the writing workshop. Maybe the mistake is framing the debate in a reductive way, as I am myself doing right now, alas. All, in the end, is in the collapse of dialectical reductions, as the postmodernist theoreticians have taught us.

JS: I’d like to bring up one of the most powerful moments in The Diviners, which seems like a culmination of Gaddis’ style with Banks’ affect. At the center of this book is a story about a young woman who sustained a significant head injury. When she comes to consciousness, her thoughts are perfectly absurd. She has this line about books being made in Utica, which is a place in China. It is so unique that I couldn’t confuse her with any other character, in the style of Gaddis. But at the same time, her story has the most affect, which seems to be coming from Banks. Her absurdity is simultaneously humorous and heartbreaking. So many characters in the book have ridiculous problems but she has the most heartfelt problem.

RM: I can’t remember that much about The Diviners, in all honesty, because it was a while ago, and I tend to think about the project at hand much more than about what I did in the past. But I really remember the head-injury passage of The Diviners, and if there’s a sequence in that book that I still feel quite good about it’s that one. I often read it aloud when I was reading from the novel on tour, and so certain bits of it have lingered with me since. Also, there’s a former student of mine, a neurologist/fiction writer, with whom I have been having a long debate about the nature of consciousness. My argument is that consciousness consists of processing power, sensory data, and language. What consciousness is not is an on/off switch. Clearly the recent news about whales attacking fishing vessels in the Atlantic, indicates levels of cooperation, wisdom, and volition in those higher mammals that, if not exactly “consciousness” in the human sense, represent some whale-specific version thereof. The name of whale-specific consciousness is a thing that can only be understood in whale speech. If consciousness is not an on/off switch, then there are intermediate stages, or stages for which there should be a related word or name. The head-injury character in The Diviners had an intermediate stage of consciousness, at least while in her coma stasis. Her stage is more shards of consciousness, consciousness instantiation. There’s lots of feeling in that passage you’re referring to, lots of poignancy (I hope!), but also some ideas, and a language especially fashioned to convey all of that. A bit like Gaddis? Maybe yes! But full of feeling like the realists, or at least I hope so.

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