nerve disease and mother of Hex, the alcoholic, stuttering hero. As the novel asserts at the end of the first chapter: “if he’s a hero, then heroes are five-and-dime, and the world is as crowded with them as it is with stray pets, worn tires, and missing keys.” In 2007, The Washington Post reviewed Moody’s collection of novellas Right Livelihoods, describing "The Albertine Notes" as “one of the best stories to appear in the new millennium; it underscores that Rick Moody is one of our best writers.” Irish weekly The Sunday Business Post called the story “a symbolic reaction to the crisis of instability in American identity today” and remarked that the collection as a whole “brilliantly reflects the unease and baroque insecurities of the post-9/11 nation." Michael Chabon and Thomas Pynchon gave high praise for the memoir, The Black Veil, the former calling it "a unique blend of wrenching emotion and human playfulness," the latter saying Moody "writing with boldness, humor, generosity of spirit, and a welcome sense of wrath, takes the art of the memoir an important step into its future." His 2005 novel The Diviners received praise as well. "If you like watching the smartest kid in the room do his stuff," The Washington Post wrote, "The Diviners is like a Broadway musical filled with nothing but showstoppers, as Moody performs one bravura set piece after another. Brooke Allen, writing for The Wall Street Journal, said that "Rick Moody is one of the most prodigiously talented writers in America...like a master ventriloquist, Mr. Moody fills "The Diviners" with stunning little monologues...In the novel's most impressive display of technical prowess, Mr. Moody even puts himself inside the head of an autistic boy—and makes us feel that he has gotten it right." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, in their June 2003 issue, says of Moody's writing: "Within Moody's fictional treatments, the reader is necessarily one step removed from experience. We are engaged within a tight fuselage-world of the rendered text, an intricate and highly original language system wherein lurks characters sustained by the exertion of words, like the music sustained by the exertion of piano keys. Indeed, Moody's characters are like word-chords whose considerable tribulations and emotional woundings are never the central fact of the text, but rather convincing casings, occasions to press ink on paper. Voices emerge--language projections that ignite from plot moments, from brutal experience set to