I can't remember why I wanted to read Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death. The Rumpus Book Club had a few copies they were tossing around last summer, towards the beginning of the club. I didn't earn a copy (weak plea for wanting to read it), and received Stephen Elliot's The Adderall Diaries instead. I have to say, looking back on the two books, I'm glad I got the book I did. Elliot has become a staple of mine, a ballast in more ways than one. He's helped spawn things. Moody's novel, on the other hand, has made my reading momentum sputter here in the early parts of 2011.Regardless of why I wanted to read it in the first place, the jacket blurb sold me. It promised that The Four Fingers of Death "will delight admirers of comic masterpieces like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49, and Catch-22." If any publicist knew what to put onto a jacket to get me enticed it was this one. And for a while the novel did. A comic novel, weighing in at 720 pages, set in 2025, it pushes a lot of the buttons that Vonnegut does, which is appropriate as ol' Kurt is the novel's dedicatee.
In a postmodern twist, Moody's novel is home to another writer, Montese Crandall. In the Introduction and the Afterword we get his story. A master of the micromicrostory, Crandall is an author who has excelled at nothing but the six word story. This makes for an interesting reading, but also contrasts with the opus of an interior novel, the effective Four Fingers of Death as written by Crandall. A novelization of the remake of the 1963 film The Crawling Hand, Crandall wins the rights to author the book via a chess game with Dr. Tyrannosaurus. Instead of sticking to the screenplay, the book is a platform for the comic portrayal of life as Crandall, or Moody, sees it in 2025.
Crandall frames his novel in two books. In book one, with the dominance of NAFTA having given way to the rise of the Sino-Indian compact, Crandall depicts NASA's scientific coup de grace of landing men on Mars. Told via the e-mail dispatches of astronaut Jed Richards, the mission goes awry from the outset. Jed falls for Captain Jim Rose, and while they are having an illicit love affair other astronauts turn traitor. In one encounter, a berserk astronaut takes three fingers off of Jed's hand, of which only two are found and reattached. Thus the four fingered hand is born, though in book one it remains attached to its owners body.
Book two chronicles the arm back on Earth, where, contaminated by a Martian bacteria, it proceeds to wreak havoc. It lands in the southwest, outside of Rio Blanco, and proceeds to do what an arm has always done, grasp, clench, claw. A bloody swath is born, and of those who come in contact with the arm who are fortunate to avoid strangulation are at risk of contamination. Enter taboo cults, robot sex, a talking chimp, odd philosophies, crazy science, and you've got the ingredients for a grand, postmodern comic novel.
Unfortunately, Moody just doesn't hit it quite right. Given the range and potential that could be summoned in a book of this length, the novel felt strangely contained. The strands, so distinctly developed, all kind of mash into each other for the final 200 pages. Some taper off, forgotten, while other, less prominent strains emerge to give us the novel's climax. The entire frame is interesting enough, and I'm a big fan of how Moody opens up the world of what was supposed to be a B-movie novelization to explore love, death and vanity. But it falls flat too often. Moody changes his tune every ten to fifteen pages, emerging with a new voice, a five page paragraph,or a new POV. And some of this really works. I should admit my literary shortcomings, as I believe many of these parody tokens of the literary genre, but they aren't explicit enough, or revealing enough, to merit the slog that they occasionally become.
That's not to say that this novel isn't worth reading. More, it's a reflection that The Four Fingers of Death could have been so much more. Shortened a few hundred pages and Moody could have delivered a crisp analysis of what's to become of human civilization in the years to come while keeping us with him to believe it.
