It’s a strange and slow process to realize you don’t have much in common anymore with a writer you once really cared about. I already knew Rick Moody’s name in the late ‘90s from having shelved copies of his novels in the bookstore I worked at in college, but I didn’t really find out about him until I read an essay in Harper’s in 1999, shortly after graduating. Its hypothesis, as I recall, was that American fiction was enjoying a clandestine sort of renaissance due to the fact that its practitioners had given up any illusions that their work might be profitable, and thus had become free to do whatever they liked; I remember the piece also mentioning Tim O’Brien, Lydia Davis, and David Foster Wallace (among others), all of whom I’d go on to read.

I started with The Ice Storm which I read in a single sitting as a fierce lightning storm went on outside my apartment, a studio in the Tenderloin in San Francisco. My bed faced the window, and I’d look up every twenty pages or so to another big flash. It was one of those wonderful reading experiences where you feel like the outside world is complicit in what you’re reading, the kind you never forget. I can’t even remember whether I’d seen the movie yet; in any case, I was so immersed in Rick Moody’s Connecticut of 1973 that Ang Lee’s version was irrelevant either way. And I thought it was one of the best books I’d read in a long time, so I soon plunged into The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven, which I also enjoyed even while thinking some of its more experimental stories were somewhat self-conscious, and also recognizing the collection as a practically stamped invitation to get more involved with Rick Moody’s personality, the drinking and depression and self-doubt, which of course were also qualities I could relate to on a profound level. So I read Garden State, which was born from those very qualities, and I enjoyed it enough to forgive its first-novelishness, and I felt I could understand some its suburban slacker ennui. Meanwhile, my relationship with the author’s own personality developed further and began to feel slightly awkward, especially due to the new introduction he’d added, in which besides offering a quick CliffsNotes on the drinking and depression and self-doubt (as well as his idolatry of the Feelies—granted, a very good band), Moody posited that a “vocal minority” saw the book as his best novel because of the way it sketched out a certain cultural mindset that became more broadly relevant after Nirvana and after Rick Linklater’s first film. Honestly, this made me feel a little weird at the time, and it still does.

I read Purple America, which I thought was his best and bravest novel, if also perhaps the pinnacle to that date of his very verbose brand of hysterical realism. When it came out a year or two later, I read his second story collection, Demonology, and this had some extraordinarily beautiful and well-constructed stories in it, though I realized that one of my favorites, called Boys, however poignant, was sort of a glorified writing exercise, a list actually, and lists were something I’d begun to realize Moody had a real weakness for. Elsewhere in the collection were more experiments that were both clever and annoyingly meta, and again his tendency toward intellectualized memoirish commentary was mildly off-putting, perhaps because I was realizing it was a tendency I shared and maybe didn’t particularly care for in myself.

I was in a writing workshop at UCLA in 2002 when the Dale Peck brouhaha erupted. When we discussed the question of the state of modern literary criticism in class, most people took the Jeffrey Eugenides position (more or less the middle ground), while I excoriated Dale Peck and passionately defended Rick Moody, and even photocopied Moody’s Angels story The James Dean Garage Band for one of my classmates. I did have to admit though that the passage from The Black Veil that Peck cited and tore to shreds sounded pretty godawful, and I never could bring myself to read the book, perhaps also because it was a memoir and Moody’s earlier stabs at memoir had made me uncomfortable. Over the next few years, the only Moody writing I read (aside from a reread of The Ice Storm, which was still good but not as good), were a couple of pieces of semi-music criticism, including one about Wilco that had its merits but also had some pomposity, and another in The Believer that boiled down the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs to Moody’s personal 31 favorites. They both seemed heavily stylized and self-aware.

Recently I’ve been trying to read his latest, The Diviners, which wants to be a broad, sprawling social satire about the entertainment business, set in New York in 2000 during the election fracas. It’s slow going. I could barely get through the prologue, unfortunately titled “Opening Credits and Theme Music,” which takes a tour of the world’s sunrises, beginning in Los Angeles, moving west, mostly visiting places between the equator and the 45th parallel, before winding up in New York City. I guess it’s got some poetry, but it’s also just another Moody list, the first of many in the book. Truth be told, I’m only a third of the way through now, partly because I’ve paused to read a couple other books. What I’m especially struck by is the fact that he’s taken his trademark windiness to whole new levels. Besides the monomaniacal listmaking, there’s also a refusal to say anything one way if it can be restated seven alternate ways. His cleverness is getting more trying also, especially the winking habit of referring to familiar pop-cultural figures and phenomena, like, say, Cops or Katie Couric, without naming them but rather by offering only clever descriptors. Underneath all the flogging of language and the endless authorial commentary is a set of characters who derive personality from an assortment of tics and stereotypes, all of whom offer long monologues from time to time in more or less the same voice, and sure, I guess it’s satirical, and I guess the style of the writing is intended to mirror its subject matter, but its not especially incisive or well-honed satire, and it’s not much fun to read. I’m not sure if Dale Peck ruined Rick Moody for me, or if I just outgrew him as an author—or maybe this is just a bad book—but either way it’s looking more and more like this is a real breakup.