The late John Gardner wrote that every story fits one of two types: A stranger comes to town. A character goes on a journey.
Douglas Watson sends his character, a moody fellow named Moody Fellow, on a journey—not physical but spiritual. The plot follows our hero from his earliest days spent dreaming about elves to college, where he joins the campus antiwar group and promptly falls in love with all the girls involved. After college, Moody delivers coffee beans and plays piano for performance artists. Eventually he meets Kate, a girl in a chapeau, who works at a stationary store. They fall in love. They move in together. They play tennis and scrabble. They live happily ever after … right up to the point that Moody dies.
Moody’s whole life, like many of ours, boils down to one thing: the search for love. For much of his teenage and college years, that search proves unsuccessful. Sure, he has girlfriends, kisses said girlfriends, even loses his virginity under a “big white moon that shone down on the lawn like a stage light.” Yet the love he thinks he has found goes unreciprocated. His girlfriends all cheat on him, in fact. Yet after every romantic mishap, Moody doesn’t blame the girl. He feels the cheating “was not about her at all but [was] instead about him, a judgment on him.”
The chronically rejected among us surely identify.
As Moody meets strange and revealing characters, his journey sometimes takes on the feel of historical allegory. Take, for instance, the performance artist Amanda, whose Medusan beauty causes men to drop dead when they gaze fully upon her face. We find Chad, a middle-aged aspiring artist who finally finds success, but also finds it beginning to sink him into fears of failure. However minor these characters, they play key roles in helping Moody finally find love … and a love that responds in kind. Our hero will die—ah, don’t we all?—but as Watson writes, “Moody got to go out on a high note.”
Watson pens a darkly comic novel. Most of the humor comes from omniscient narrators who serve as a tragic Greek chorus, observing action from afar. At times, they act like gods and intervene to make the story they want:
Moody came very close to being murdered by a bolt of lightning. Indeed, we were in the mood to see him killed, but … he hadn’t found love yet, which meant that according to the terms laid out at the beginning of the narrative, he had to be allowed to live a bit longer.
It’s a clever approach to metafiction. Near the end of the novel, shortly before our moody traveler’s death, the narrators hold an exit interview to discuss the job Moody has done as a protagonist: