[In the following review, MacFarlane finds Demonology to be “an uneven collection,” despite the presence of several strong stories in the book.]

At one point in Todd Solondz's 1998 film Happiness, a female novelist is talking to her sister on the telephone, while her bronzed and unclad lover lifts weights. “You know, people put New Jersey down,” she tells her sister. “None of my friends can actually believe I live here, but they just don't get it—I'm living in a state of irony.” New Jersey, dubbed the Garden State in a fit of bucolic irony by its tourist board, provided the location and the title for Rick Moody's depressing first novel, Garden State (1993). His second, The Ice Storm (1994), presented the decay of the suburban ideal in 1970s New England; Ang Lee turned it into a bleakly elegant film. Purple America (1997), his third, described twenty-four terrible hours in the life of a Connecticut family—mother an invalid, son an alcoholic, stepfather fled—and was compared with James Joyce's Ulysses for its timescale, its vibrant, runaway language and its versatile use of the interior monologue. Moody, in other words, has steadily turned the states of the Eastern seaboard into his stamping ground, and suburban dysfunctionality into his motif. American critics have hailed him as the new chronicler of middle-class America, heir to John Cheever.

Demonology, Moody's most recent book, is a collection of thirteen formally experimental short stories of which the uniting theme is fragmentation, and the milieu the cities and suburbs of the East Coast. It is an uneven collection. “Pan's Fair Throng,” which looks as though it might be an allegory about Marx, is written in a hammed-up fairy-tale rhetoric, there is an over-solemn two-page sentence about an armoire, and “Boys,” though formally witty, is too bloodless to be interesting. These duds, however, are offset by several brilliant pieces.

“Surplus Value Books: Catalogue Number 13,” for example, is a story printed to resemble a second-hand book catalogue. The author is a camp caffeine addict and bibliophile who glosses and prices his books according to their idiosyncratic roles in his past:

Carrington, Leonora. Chilblains. Paris: Editions Aveugle, 1921. Little known roman à clef, by the great surrealist. A library copy, actually stolen from the Widener, at Harvard, by yours truly. The story goes thus. I was desperately in love with an art history student, Anna Feldman, she of the blond bob, she of the palindromic name, she of the ballerina's frame. … I offer it at bargain price. ＄75.

One is put immediately in mind of Kinbote's digressive footnotes in Pale Fire. Wry and witty, Moody's story eventually makes its serious point: “it is things that make us happy … you and I know that collection is merely autobiography.” (Incidentally, this story is itself available in a limited edition for ＄20 from Danger! Books of Santa Monica; one entrepreneur is already offering his second-hand copy online at the “bargain price” of ＄250.)

This same idea—that lives are defined by externals and accretions, rather than intrinsically lived—is developed in “Wilkie Fahnstock, The Boxed Set,” another formally interesting story that hovers between obituary, elegy and satire. It appears on the page as the sleeve notes, written by one “Rick Moody,” to a ten-volume anthology of pop songs. The notes announce the project to be “a profound effort to bring to the public one of the representative lives of the last century: Wilkie Fahnstock, a confused, contemporary young person … a person of meager accomplishment. … But a guy who nonetheless has a very large collection of compact discs!” Alongside the notes are printed the titles of the 200-odd songs that make up the anthology, and with which the fictional Fahnstock calibrated his life; again, collection is presented by Moody as a form of autobiography, a way of narrating the self.

Two of the least likeable characters in Demonology use the hyper-structured language of cultural theory to make sense of their lives. One is a psychologist who speaks to her adolescent son as though to a seminar, all “contested spaces,” “individuations” and “social networks.” The other appears in “The Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal,” a consciously Joycean exercise in écriture féminine. The story consists of a single sixteen-page sentence spoken by a doctoral student, and describing her relationship with a male academic who refuses marriage because it is “a social construction of commitment … all about bourgeois power and patrimony.” When he suggests that femininity is itself a construct that she exploits, she takes surprising steps to prove otherwise. References to Lacan, Derrida and other godheads of theory abound, and this complexly entertaining story will doubtless be picked over by literary-theory classes, though Moody's moral—that the ultra-connectedness of theory is unhelpful when dealing with real life—will probably be missed.

A significant challenge of survival in late twentieth-century America, Moody suggests in Demonology, is establishing and maintaining a sense of self. The best of these stories push creatively at the short-story form, and offer insights, though not solutions, into how we try to give shape and continuity to our lives.