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Title: Unthreatening but pandering
Review: It's easy to understand Moody's appeal. His short fiction offers facile experimentalism with a commercial gloss. His idea of innovation is to go a little crazy with italics in unexpected places. Readers feel flattered, unthreatened. Moody is a "safe" writer--he'll never take you any place that might unsettle you. The occasional comparisons to Cheever and Updike are especially troubling, because as a stylist Moody has few discernible gifts other than the colloquial crispness one associates with overexcited magazine features. Moody is not a major writer. That he is mistaken for one, and promoted as one, and accepted as one, says a lot about the decline of literary fiction in this country.
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