From Original Sin to drug addiction, from Jersey sex to dying parents to television and movie parodies, he has written our seriousness and silliness into the pages of what will one day be part of the history of late 20th century-early 21st century American literary history with style and panache. His short stories, novellas and novels have made it clear that no one, especially since the death of David Foster Wallace, has the ability to hold traditional American culture and American pop culture in the same grasp and write about it with such force and good humor. You Moody fans already know that he is one of our most gifted young writers. 729 pages $25.99)Īll hail Rick Moody! I hail Rick Moody! But in case you're worrying about reading an 800-word review of a 700-page novel that adds up to nothing more than a monumental and affectionate pastiche of a Kurt Vonnegut book, better to stop reading here. Whether they will stick around to buy or to read all the way through remains to be seen, but the planned 9-city author tour will help.By Rick Moody (Little, Brown and Co. 25) Forecast: Fans of Moody's novels and previous short story collection (The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, 1995) will rush to flip through this uneven volume. Moody's self-conscious prose strains for hyper-modern colloquial detachment, but too often misses its mark, clanging just off-key. In ''Carousel,'' an aging, low-level Hollywood actress muses on the metaphysics of the movie business and ends up stuck in the middle of a drive-by shooting while waiting at McDonald's to buy orange juice for her daughter (''So why are they here? According to what rationale? Do they even have juice at McDonald's?'').

First published in McSweeney's, ''The Double Zero,'' another of Moody's stories, describes the humorous failure of a family ostrich ranch. The death of a sister is the theme of the title story, too, a tale Moody confesses at the end is hardly fictional at all, echoing in his fervent first-person declarations the nonfiction stylings of Dave Eggers. Coincidentally finding himself employed at a ritzy wedding-planning business, Andrew alternates memories of the past with clunky product-speak descriptions of his job. ''The Mansion on the Hill,'' the first and perhaps the best, follows the adventures of narrator Andrew Wakefield as he tries to come to terms with his sister's death-she was killed in a car accident just before her wedding.

Sending wry, heartbroken characters across the slightly tilted landscapes of his fiction, Moody fosters a low-grade bemusement in the 13 stories collected here.

The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody