While semi-famous literary critic Dale Peck would disagree (he led his review of The Black Veil with “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation”), if you’re going to criticize Rick Moody, calling him a “hack” probably isn’t the way to go.
Still, if you’re a Tucsonan, reading Moody’s essay “reflect[ing]” on our city in Newsweek, it’s a little difficult to understand what exactly he’s trying to say. Oh, you saw a man playing banjo in the heat? People riding unicycles? Someone let you in on the secret of how we leave bodies in ravines, just for kicks? This guy has us pegged!
However, this is sort of Rick Moody’s beat. I couldn’t even try to describe the first section of his novel The Four Fingers of Death. It’s oddly funny. It’s definitely strange, but I wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell you what it’s “about”. Moody is a style guy. He operates on a different plane than nearly every other writer out there. He spends quite a bit of time discussing different body fluids and zero gravity. I don’t know why, but he does do it well.
I guess he’s supposed to give the readers of Newsweek a sense of what Tucson is like, now that we’re largely out of the unfortunate national spotlight brought on by Jared Loughner, and he does that in an artsy way, I guess, but it’s a mistake to blame Moody for being Moody. Maybe it’s a better question to wonder why they couldn’t just find someone who lives here to talk about Tucson these days (and no, I don’t mean me). Tina Brown probably found out Moody was coming to town and asked him to throw something together, and that’s a spectacular idea on paper. It just might be a short sighted one. Moody mentions that we have great tacos still post-January 8th and paints a beautiful picture of the monsoon clouds rolling in, but he doesn’t say really say anything, and that’s a shame. Not because Moody isn’t a great writer, but because someone else should have been given the opportunity to tell our city’s story.
This article appears in Aug 11-17, 2011.
Dan – you always say exactly what I want to say ! Excellent.
I respectfully disagree, Dan. Writing puffed up prose to paint a picture that bears little to no resemblance to reality definitely qualifies one as a hack. I’d go into more detail, but I’ve got to drop that body off in the ravine by the 18th hole on my way to my daily sex-and-pharmaceutical romp…
Meh.
I agree with the one person who commented about it potentially keeping people from moving here. and that being a good thing.
Really though, I didn’t think it was so bad. Exaggerated yes, but whatever. His article wasn’t overflowing with gushing love for us. While we’re not perfect, I can see the rainbow in the ugliness. Best town I’ve ever lived in
F*@% Rick Moody
The guy is just using a hackneyed, dull technique to create an image of the town. Drawing weird inferences from irrelevant, if spectacular, factoids is a pretty boring trick. Violent because it’s close to the border? Albuquerque, Phoenix and Las Vegas are somewhat violent too, and not particularly near the border. Bodies in ravines? That’s Jan Brewer talking. And just when did he see the guy on the unicycle? 12 years in Tucson and I might have seen just one unicycle…same guy, maybe?
It’s a lousy piece not because I hate hearing bad things about Tucson- I love it in fact, if they’re accurate. Does anyone remember the article from the 90s by a guy called Kaplan from one of the more hoity-toity mags like the Atlantic Monthly, or some such? It caused a huge stir for decrying Tucson’s ugliness, the stranglehold developers have on politics and policy, and the “OK, we’re here now, let’s lock the gate behind us” mentality of the foothills. Of course, the Chamber of Commerce and the Convention and Visitors Bureau flew into tizzies over it, which led me to think the article was onto something. Not long after the article was published, all copies were magically sold out and unavailable. I looked for it in the late 1990s at the UA library…that particular issue was the only one missing from the previous several years’ worth in the collection.
Anyway, it’s just as well to hound the author for a cruddy article, even though it may well have the salutory effect of keeping people away. I hope to move back to Tucson one day soon, after having made the monumental error of leaving, and I’d hate to have the joy of my permanent return marred by discovering that someone dropped Phoenix or L.A. into Pima County.
anybody who uses anything that originated from Jan Brewer is automatically null and void in any arena, period.