I don't know if any of you have noticed yet,
but Rick Moody is in the room.
Rick Moody used to write fiction about aimless teens,
neurotic families, and deviant sexual practices.
Now, he has added to his repertoire doomed missions
to Mars and murderous, infected four-fingered hands.
In the first part of his career, Rick Moody
was one of the best writers of literary fiction
with novels like The Ice Storm.
But his short fiction, in which the oddest things can happen,
in which, for instance, James Dean can survive his car crash
and start a rock band, always tended
toward the stranger, always tended toward the wackier.
He studied fiction with postmodern giants John Hawkes
and Angela Carter, and his new novel, The Four Fingers
of Death, is a grand experimental work
in the best possible way, a genre-blurring book that
takes the form of a novelization of a 2025
remake of an actual film, The Crawling Hand, from 1963.
This novelization comes complete with an introduction
and an afterwards from its author, Montese Crandall,
who has pursued literary minimalism
to the point at which he can no longer write stories
longer than a sentence.
Moody, by the way, does not have this problem.
Obviously, Moody is playing in the territory of Barthes
and Pynchon with this novel, and the set pieces,
like a sex scene between two male astronauts that
takes place in zero gravity, are marvelously absurd.
But Moody also displays a tenderness
missing from a lot of experimental comic fiction.
It is one thing to have a scientist attempting
to implant the DNA of his dead wife into an orangutan,
but it is another matter to devote so much attention
to the very sad fact that the scientists still
writes regular letters to that dead wife.
It is one thing to have the minimalist author taking
on the job of a novelization act as a literary in-joke,
but it's another thing to have him
doing it all to raise the money to keep his wife alive.
This book is full of wit, energy, and sadness,
like all the best fiction I've read.
And it might interest everyone here
to know that the novel's second half takes place
in Rio Blanco, a dystopic town in the Sonoran desert.
And when it is mentioned that one character purchased
jump boots and torn jeans and a monochromatic sweater
from the thrift shops down on Fourth Avenue,
it's a little hard not to think of a Tucson years
in the future, a desolate landscape full of scientists,
hormone-ridden teenagers who use the word "fuck" like
it's an extension of breathing, and murderous hands.
And there is one more thing about Rick Moody
that I like immensely and I would like to share with you.
It's that he is the only writer I
can think of who has settled a literary feud by throwing
a pie into the face of an insolent critic.
In this way, maybe Rick moody is like some kind
of bizarro version of writers of yore, an absurdist Ernest
Hemingway, an eccentric Norman Mailer.
In his own way, Rick Moody carries on all the best
traditions in fiction, the rambunctious, the waggishness,
the restlessness, and the ability
to attack each novel like a new puzzle, his voice and approach
changing, but the result always unmistakably his.
Please join me in welcoming the rowdy, the raucous, the rocking
Rick Moody.
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]