Rick Moody’s new book, “The Diviners” (Little, Brown $25.95) makes virtually no attempt at the suspension of disbelief. It is pure performance. In 31 chapters, which more often than not introduce new narrators, “The Diviners” adumbrates the hype surrounding an epic miniseries that does not actually exist except as hype.

In 2002, Mr. Moody was famously called “the worst writer of his generation” by the New Republic’s Dale Peck. Like many extremely negative reviews, this one did not take the author on his own terms. Mr. Peck’s review made the point that Mr. Moody’s output constitutes not an oeuvre so much as a career; in the end, however, Mr. Peck was content to point out grammatical flaws and neglected to consider the ambitions that might inspire a career such as Mr. Moody’s.

Mr. Moody takes the interconnectivity and synchronicity of contemporary society as his basic subject. In a 1995 story, “The Grid,” Mr. Moody imagined an overhead view of Manhattan that would realize all the first kisses taking place simultaneously, perhaps harnessing the energy that might renew “our decaying metropolis.” The Internet, cellular phones, and pervasive popular music inspire this grid consciousness, as does the old conceit of sociology, that social facts are sui generis, irreducible to individual psychological or biological fact. In other words, Mr. Moody believes society has truly become an organism, and he writes from the point of view of that organism. It is not man against society, but society against nature, or something less tangible.

“The Diviners” amplifies those ambitions, clearly: In his zeal to perform the voice of society, Mr. Moody takes ephemeral hype as his subject. But it is too perfect. At least “The Ice Storm” was about a family; short stories like “The Carnival Tradition” established a binary simultaneity, what the author called “a delirium of stories in which the principles never quite met.” “The Diviners” sounds more like white noise. Its plurality lacks a point.

A miscommunication between a harried production boss and her overeducated assistants spawns an elaborate globe-trotting plotline, a multicultural bonanza that passes, as in a giant game of telephone, from white lie to industry wide grail. Each of the roughly 25 narrators has the same long-breathed voice, even those – a team of detectives, for example – that are corporate. This grid, comprising the staff of the production company and other New York or L.A. press and entertainment elites, along with token American weirdos from the lower classes, is not a chorus of different voices, but literally one ventriloquized societal voice. Take this indirect discourse hovering between two detectives:

What a boon to New York City policing. The detectives feel that the more complex varieties, such as the chocolate ice-cream filled, or the glazed lemon filled, are tasty, but these are not really the doughnuts that the detectives consider the essential business line of the Krispy Kreme corporation. The essential business line is the original glazed donut. The detectives speak of the cultural penetration of the original glazed, how it has acquired an almost fetishistic reputation among consumers. Consider, for example, tiered doughnut wedding cakes. Concentric rings of original glazed doughnuts, in a fractal design, with lightweight bride and groom ornaments at the summit. This wedding cake design is taking off now, and it proves that the only way to go, with a business line like the original glazed, is up.

Surely the detectives do not speak of “cultural penetration” and “fetishistic reputations,” at least not in so many words. This passage reads as if a smart academic had got hold of the detectives’ psychic lives, selected this most piquant section – police, doughnuts – with its hip chocolate ice-cream filled grotesqueness, and presented it in a pleasing package, tied up with the neat pun on upwardly-mobile wedding cakes. Grid consciousness reads a lot like cultural studies.

As a writer, Mr. Moody goes the distance, exhausting himself and sometimes excelling at the less than macrocosmic level. A chapter narrated by a brain-damaged girl stands out, not because it is convincing but because it is justly lyrical. Elsewhere, however, overdone grandiosity follows Mr. Moody’s horizon-shaped ambitions. He indulges in biblical shimmer – “The name of the company shall be ‘Means of Production'” – and tired, liberal-sympathetic angles on Christianity. His Mosaic climaxes take place on mountaintops: “The Diviners” begins with a description of sunrise circling the globe, and ends with a speech on power by a Supreme Court justice who sounds like Antonin Scalia.

Mr. Moody is obviously not “the worst writer of his generation.” He is too interesting to be that. But Mr. Peck was right to use the phrase “of his generation”: Mr. Moody’s ravenously contemporary writing is a perfect time capsule for a generation whose obsession is its own self-diagnostic stylishness.

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“White Teeth” made a splash. It achieved a 19th-century density with 21st-century people. Zadie Smith had no avatar among her characters, inhabiting each with equal frankness and pity; she didn’t seem to have to work at her imagination. Her inevitably disappointing second novel, “Autograph Man,” was a novel of information obsessed with pop culture, as whimsically clogged and self-interrupting as the writing of David Foster Wallace or Dave Eggers.

But it would be a mistake to confuse Ms. Smith’s indulgence in social fact with her capacity for big plots and multifarious characters. The real payoff of “White Teeth,” after all, was not its magic-bullet relation to the formal history of the novel, but the smart pleasure with which Smith threaded one character to another, taking Archie up out of his suicide, around and around a traffic circus, and into the arms of a tall Jamaican woman. There was piquancy in it – whether due to the foreign freshness of her characters or not, Ms. Smith owned it.

Her new novel, “On Beauty” (Penguin Press, 390 pages, $25.95), is not so fresh. Taking her inspiration from E.M. Forster’s “Howards End,” Ms. Smith successfully substitutes academic culture wars and American awkwardness about race for Forster’s capitalist-suffragist dynamic and class system. The impatience of social problems and their demand to be solved is thus abstracted. It looks like a not-too-complex mobile of revolving interlocking – blank – parts, enlivened by the winds of Zadie as happily as by the winds of Forster.

But where Forster’s characters gently knock one another, slowly correcting one another’s paths, Ms. Smith’s characters spin alone, aflutter with vivd, damning details. They begin and end in hypocrisy.

Levi, the mixed-race professor’s son who is one of the novel’s several Helen Schlegels, illustrates social stress as well as any character. “He don’t do no wilding out,” he says, in reference to a spoken-word artist, “he got no crunk, no hyphy, no East coast vibe to test what be happening on the West coast.” Levi’s sister, Zora, is just as good at self-indictment. “She’s just a typical pretty girl, power-game playing, deeply shallow human being,” Zora says of Victoria, the novel’s Paul Wilcox. “She tries to hide it by reading one book by Barthes or whatever – all she does is quote Barthes; it’s so tedious.”

In Forster’s novel, the half-German Schlegel sisters represent art and art’s wish to guide. “Only connect” is their motto: Only connect “the prose and the passion” or “the beast and the monk.” Thus they teach rich Mr. Wilcox, the peremptory moralist, to be more human. They are meddlesome but they win. The novel begins with three distinct families but ends with one; insofar as “only connect” could describe the action of a social novel, it would describe a central gravity.

In Smith’s novel, the Schlegel-equivalents are doomed academic liberals, too narcissistic to reach out to her Wilcoxes. She roots for what she eloquently calls “the invisibles of the earth,” but the worldly oppositions she so expertly arranges take up most of her time, crowding the interesting fallout to the end. Her character named Howard, like the eponymous estate of Forster’s title, is appropriately both artistic and cold, both Schlegel and Wilcox – he is a desiccated art history professor staking his reputation against Rembrandt’s. Howard experiences one moving breakdown, but it pales among our literature’s great canon of middle-aged men’s breakdowns.

“On Beauty” takes its name from Harvard professor Elaine Scarry’s book-length essay of the same name. Ms. Smith has recently been a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, and “On Beauty” makes ample use of recent Harvard gossip. The recent free-speech controversy concerning Tom Paulin makes an appearance, and Ms. Smith’s main poetry character acts like another weary approximation of Jorie Graham, with traces of Louise Gluck.

“On Beauty” is not saved by being a satire, though it takes honest shots at campus language. Ms. Smith smiles at the unlikely gravity of the word “inappropriate,” and she destroys the word “amazing,” in its insincere usage by lazy talkers: “That [lecture] was amazing”; “[you are] the ideal ‘stay-at-home’ Christian Mom – which is amazing of course – but there must also be things you … maybe, things you wanted to do….”

But Ms. Smith’s sniping at academic shorthand is undercut by her own shorthand: “In response Kiki gave Claire the long-distance look of surprise and swept her hand up and down to signify the change in Claire …” she writes, without describing the long-distance look of surprise. We are meant to know it, which is a dead-end pleasure. Ms. Smith’s social critique operates at a place of knowingness, where all the minds in her novel could meet and, in good humor, agree. Forster’s characters are originally more fundamentally different from one another, which gives them room to change. “On Beauty” has many rewards, but it is not a development of “White Teeth”‘s enduring promise.