Rod Val Moore - a paralytically funny run through the labyrinths of ontology, consciousness, imagination, illness, family, plight; like Omensetter’s Luck meets The Simpsons, only Bart is paralyzed

Rod Val Moore, A History of Hands. University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

This powerful novel begins with the ambiguities of illness and moves on to explore both the reasonable and the absurd actions of those who suffer and those who exploit suffering. The setting is a failed farm on the Central California coast during a time of rural isolation and decline. Virge, the protagonist, is an awkwardly introspective young man living with his parents, suffering from lingering effects of an accidental childhood poisoning, including a lack of coordination and the possibility of mental weakness. Within the first few pages, Virge trips, falls, and finds that his hands have become paralyzed—a potential disaster for someone unable to afford a doctor’s visit.
Soon, however, an elderly and possibly criminal doctor, offering free therapy, moves in, much to the dismay of bedridden Virge. While the physician endeavors to restore the patient’s hands with a series of highly suspect injections, Virge recovers his sense of autonomy and an urge to escape the suffocating domestic circumstances that have perhaps caused his illnesses in the first place.
A History of Hands is a novel that invites the reader into a richly and eccentrically detailed world where fevered imaginations and dark comedy prevail, but where the determination to escape the ambiguities of illness leads to the equal ambiguities of health and freedom.

Moore artfully weaves this unusual family, set on failing farm in California in the midst of a blighted year. One ill-fated day, which begins with an ominous warning from the narrator, everything changes. Having previously suffered from rose dust poisoning, the son, Virgil, already "too old to live with his parents" but dependent on them nevertheless, falls to the ground and cannot get up as he has lost all sensation in his arms. A suspicious elderly doctor, who is "superannuated and frail" but oddly energentic, arrives with his young aide Stuart to heal Virge's affliction free of charge. Narrated with finesse, the tempered absurdity combines dutifully with introspective loneliness and produces an enchanting effect. Luminous prose laced with dark humor, phantasmagoric imagery, and distinct and memorable characters make for a remarkable read. - Publishers Weekly

"This sad, odd, thrilling novel is unlike anything I’ve ever read. It is peopled by the vulnerable—frail bodies, wild minds—individuals with great lasting power who are capable of surprising tenderness and the quiet, surpassing cruelties of home."—Noy Holland

"In a world not so far or long away, but every bit as distant as if it were another universe, A History of Hands imagines Depression-era California as it has never been imagined before. Here, Rod Val Moore takes up the grotesque tradition of Nathaniel West to turn his eye toward California’s sparsely populated Central Coast, where drifters, charlatans, and earnest naïfs cross paths to transform forever the life of one isolated boy with troublesome hands. But what really sets this book apart is the knock-dead gorgeous writing which, like the characters and landscape it depicts, seems almost to come from another world–one that shares uncanny parallels with our own and that refracts them back at us with something between the microscopic precision of science and the skewed eloquence of translation. A History of Hands is a miracle tonic all its own, and you will not want to miss it."—Katharine Haake

"Rod Val Moore’s A History of Hands is a paralytically funny run through the labyrinths of ontology, consciousness, imagination, illness, family, plight; like Omensetter’s Luck meets The Simpsons, only Bart is paralyzed. A History of Hands quirks and hurts, successfully rising precariously above pathos through humor and philosophy, where the protagonist/victim Virge, alluding to Virgil, lies on the verge with his family, on the cusps of cruelty, affection, antagonism, and love. On top of that, the language is thick and layered and fabulous, it sucks you in and blows you out like prana, like breath. This is a novel of subtlety, complexity, humor, and wonder."—Chuck Rosenthal

"Imagine a collaboration between Henry Roth, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Rudolph Wurlitzer . . . only less derivative than that description suggests, more antic, and uniquely poignant."—Entropy Magazine

Rod Val Moore, Brittle Star, What Books Press, 2013

Exiled and abandoned on a distant planet, petty criminals enjoy their benign punishment, while one man plots to escape before the whole planet is transformed into a faux alien tourist attraction.

With the simple statement “We landed,” a nameless omniscient narrator begins the tale of academics exiled from Earth for various crimes, placed on a possibly toxic planet near the Horsehead Nebula under the easygoing thumbs of overseers called trustees. Their ship builds a residential dome where the walls are transparent and loudspeakers blare inane “maxims” to help with rehabilitation. Life drifts along in a philosophical narrative that speculates on themes of love, imprisonment, and dead planets. It becomes slightly more grounded when two professors, Knox and Krell, undertake an expedition to the polar ice cap, find an ancient Earth rocket, and become romantically attached to the same woman, Zelen. A mild and occasionally befuddling mix of Sartre and The Prisoner, Moore never lets his readers be too sure of anything, detailing existential crises yet lacking much sense of urgency. There is as much symbolism as story, and it isn’t always clear which is which. - Publishers Weekly

“In this sly and hypnotically gripping story of exiles on a distant planet where nothing is what it seems, Rod Val Moore shows us our own imagination as both wonderland and prison cell. This is Huxley’s Brave New World as it might have been reinvented by Italo Calvino: part dystopic allegory, part epistemological mindgame, and always a brilliantly insightful investigation of the human soul.”

— Stephen O’Connor, author of Here Comes Another Lesson

Rod Val Moore, Igloo among Palms, University Of Iowa Press, 1994

The stories in this prize-winning volume are set in fictional towns, along highways, and in industries on either edge of the Mexico-California border. The author uses memory and imagination to transform these scenes into a defamiliarized frontera, a region of subtle misplacements and cultural contretemps. In these engaging and extremely human stories, gringos move south and Mexicans move north in a search for growth and difference but find that the border is much more fluid, much harder to definitively cross, than they imagined.

The 1994 Iowa Short Fiction Award-winner, Moore's first collection makes a fine debut with its seven stories of the shifting California-Mexico borderlands. The characters are ordinary, slightly vague people who have lost their bearings in the indeterminate landscape of agribusiness farms, pre-fab factories and desert highways: a middle-aged policeman revisiting a disappointingly unexotic Baja in "Grimshaw's Mexico"; a young Mexican teacher fleeing to California from her widowed mother's remarriage in "Planet of the Evangelists"; or callow 20-somethings trying to get along as roommates or traveling companions in "Miss Mustachioed Bat" and "An Aztec Sphinx." The tales are small-scale tragedies of misunderstandings and vague longings in the Raymond Carver school. In the title story, a midnight dry-ice delivery run strings together the conversational fumbles of the young delivery driver, a hitchhiker and an all-night waitress, which end in a foolish accident. Despite Moore's attention to atmosphere, his hazy Mexican local color is ill-suited to his ironic distance and his all-American short-story approach. His stories are well-crafted but their slightly closed structures and themes have some of the rough edges and visible artifice of workshop work. - Publishers Weekly

“Oh, these are wonderful stories. Every one boundlessly inventive, unexpected, engrossing, edgy, and kind––their unsettled characters wandering, in all earnestness, full-tilt through the unhealthy environment of now.” —Joy Williams

“Perhaps what impresses the reader most about Mr. Moore’s collection is its imaginative waywardness. The seemingly irrelevant or startling details and shifts in plot are so grounded in each character’s consciousness that their very implausability begins to persuade us.” — New York Times Book Review

Author's blogs:

https://organicharp.wordpress.com/

https://moonfull.wordpress.com/

I envy the electric eel (Electrophorus electricus, and not an eel but a fish) who can construct his nest out of his own saliva, and put out some tremendous voltage from his own inner organic batteries. In my case, to provide myself shelter, I have to rely on others to travel to far flung corners of the earth and violently extract from it sufficient wood, plaster, copper, steel, clay, fabric, plastic, etc. How much more efficient and personal if instead I could salivate copiously and build up a home from my own inner materials, and then, with my own organs, proceed to light and heat and decorate. Even if I were only half electric eel I could sit at this computer, I imagine, and instead of requiring others to dig coal from the earth and burn it, or construct titanic dams, or split the atom, my lightly charged fingers on the keys would suffice to light up the screen and send my words across the world.

True, the electric eel generates its greatest charges, upwards of 600 volts, only in self defense. The slow strangulation of the planet that my wall plugs help along every day could be seen as a case of self-defense as well, if I accept the argument that nature is my sworn enemy, that nature is an intruder, a home invasion maniac, climbing up the trellis in the back yard, easing through the open bedroom window, reaching out tranquilly to throttle me while I, half asleep, slowly reach under the pillow for my gun, my car, my hair dryer, my computer.

On a long hike in the desert, hot and exhausted, I warily eye my shadow as I walk. What is it, exactly? Light as air, ephemeral, a filmy silhouette, an inky ghost that fears the sun and rushes to fill and define whatever space the sun can’t reach. But here’s my trick: to trade places with it. Now the shadow becomes substance, ponderous and fleshy, endowed with all the heat and weight and ache that once were mine, while I, projected by it toward the sun, become an airy ghost, an intellectual breeze, a whirl of dust in the shape of a man, perfectly able to float another ten miles, while shadow, poor shadow, scrapes along, slowly stretching out across the desert floor as day declines, so heavy and elongated at last that it can barely move. I’ll stop to watch the sunset, stop to let shadow rest! But then comes the unwelcome realization: I am the one that is temporary, the one that disappears in the dark