Until recently, Rick Moody's oeuvre - which includes The Ice Storm, Demonology, and The Black Veil: A Memoir With Digressions - could safely be characterized as serious and, well, rather moody at times.

It comes as some surprise, then, that his latest novel, The Diviners, arrives in the guise of an epic comedy. Moody is quoted in a recent interview as saying this book is his first "happy novel," but judging from its lengthy invocation and its large, motley cast of characters, it's clear that he intends The Diviners to be more than just an uplifting page-turner.

The Diviners is a blend of satire and social critique, an ambitious attempt, a la relatively recent efforts from Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections) and David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest), to capture the zeitgeist of a certain time and place - in this case, the "chad"- and media-obsessed U.S. during the election recount of 2000.

Moody seems at first to be up to the task of fulfilling any and all lofty ambitions, but as he charges on, it becomes clear that he's let the epic promise of The Diviners slip between his fingers. He spends so much time establishing his cast and weaving the web of greed and ambition they're enmeshed in that it's all the more disappointing when he sets them free so arbitrarily. One by one, the characters find their wishes granted and then drift off the page, the recipients of redemptions so quick and facile they could happen only in movies or on TV.

The Diviners opens in familiar Moody fashion, with a several-thousand- word invocation that strives for the lyrical but must settle for being merely tiresome:

"The light that illuminates the world begins in Los Angeles. Begins in darkness, begins in the mountains, begins in empty landscapes, in doubt and remorse. San Antonio Peak throws shadows upon a city of shadows. There are hints of human insignificance, there are nightmares. But at the moment of intolerability there's an eruption of spectra. It's morning! In the East! Morning is hopeful, uncomplicated, and it scales mountaintops, as it scales all things. The light comes from nowhere fathomable, from an apparently eternal reservoir of emanations, radioactivities. Light edging over the mountaintop and across the lakes of the highlands, light across the Angeles National Forest, light rushing across the skeins of smog in the California skies..."

This rather mind- numbing litany, titled "Opening Credits and Theme Music," continues for pages, as Moody moves his authorial eye around the globe to make a scattershot survey of what the world looks like as the first light of dawn is shed on it. A generous reader would call this opening gambit gutsy, but most will probably find themselves flipping ahead, wondering when the characters and the plot are going to arrive.

Lucky for them, Moody hurries to the stage a group of damaged but cheerfully drawn characters all connected to an independent film company called Means of Production.

Arguably, the novel's main presence is Vanessa Meandro, the head of Means of Production, whose penchant for bullying the staff runs second only to her weakness for food, especially Krispy Kreme doughnuts. (Her chapter-long rush through "every free-standing Krispy Kreme in the city of New York" is something of a tour de force and probably the best example of compulsive doughnut-eating in American letters, for what it's worth.)

No epic is without its central quest, and Vanessa's is to secure the rights to a story treatment called The Diviners, a "multi-generational saga" whose script exists only in the mind of a surprisingly articulate action-movie star named Thaddeus Griffin, who happens to be an employee of Means of Production.

The book follows the perambulations of the other handful of employees of Means of Production as well, not to mention a host of tenuously connected characters as diverse as Vanessa's mother, Rosa, an alcoholic descendant of actual diviners who seems to be able to telepathically receive cell-phone calls; a brilliant bike messenger; and a Britney Spears-esque vixen - an admirable range of people, all of whom share a desire to belong, to be a part of a bigger Something.

At first blush, that Something would appear to be the dream world of the movies and TV, as represented by the chimerical Diviners script. But not so fast. Just as the diviners of legend searched for water to sustain themselves, the characters of The Diviners are after something of more sustenance than mere entertainment: love, of course.

It might please some to know that Moody allows nearly each of his characters here just that - or at least a little hope in the form of the first pangs of love and lust - but, unfortunately, the result is as unsatisfying as a pat Hollywood ending.

In regard to writing The Diviners, Moody says: "I stopped trying to prove to everyone that I was a smart guy (and) this time I really tried to think ahead about story. I wanted it to move like a TV narrative moves, full of twists and turns and unpredictable outcomes."

Unpredictable outcomes are one thing, but it's quite another when narrative threads are either left completely dangling or are all too neatly sewn up. Take, for example, Rosa Meandro, who, after being under Vanessa's watchful eye for years, is inexplicably allowed to exit stage left, drunk and probably insane, "going to Florida, where's she's going to put a stop to all this election madness." What becomes of her there is anyone's guess.

And so it goes: The sick miraculously heal, the imperiled slip away unharmed, an airtight alibi crops up in the nick of time, and the girl of your dreams walks in the door. By the time Vanessa appears in Texas to scout locations for The Diviners and ends up clumsily trying to help a family of Mexicans, one can be forgiven for crying uncle.

In the course of Moody's novel, the brain trust at Means of Production decides that the Diviners script should become not a movie but a 13-part miniseries. As if a mirror of its content, the book makes a splash akin to an epic miniseries' opening episodes, with the author carefully establishing his characters and dutifully sending them along the forking path of plots, subplots and digressions, laying the groundwork for at least a weeklong saga.

But in spite of the novel's generous page count, a sense of rushed incompleteness prevails, as if Moody had been told to wrap it on Wednesday night instead of taking the time to let the narrative arc complete itself.

Thus, though it possesses all the trappings of a big, ambitious social novel, The Diviners fails to make good on the promise of its varied and entertaining cast and ultimately leaves the reader hungry for more. Good thing we still have Krispy Kreme.

Traver Kauffman's literary Web log is at rakesprogress.typepad.com. He lives in Denver.