Moody, Rick 1961–

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Moody, Rick 1961–

(Hiram F. Moody, III)

PERSONAL:

Born October 18, 1961, in New York, NY; son of Hiram F. Moody, Jr. and Margaret Maureen Davis. Education: Brown University, B.A., 1983; Columbia University, M.F.A., 1986.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Brooklyn, NY. Agent—Donadio & Ashworth, Inc., 231 W. 22nd St., New York, NY 10011.

CAREER:

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., New York, NY, associate editor, 1988-91; freelance editor, 1991—. Instructor in fiction writing and composition for Riverside Writers Group and Bennington College, 1991—. Moody and musicians David Grubbs and Hannah Marcus formed the group Wingdale Community Singers and released an album of original songs, 2005.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Editors Book Award, Pushcart Press, 1991, for Garden State; Guggenheim fellowship, 2000; PEN American Center Award, 2003, for The Black Veil.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Garden State, Pushcart Press (New York, NY), 1991.

The Ice Storm, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1994.

Purple America, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1997.

The Diviners, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2005.

OTHER

The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven (short stories), Warner Books (New York, NY), 1996.

The Ice Storm: The Shooting Script; Screenplay, Introduction, and Notes, preface by Ang Lee, Newmarket Press (New York, NY), 1997.

(Editor, with Darcey Steinke) Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1997.

Hover, photographs by Gregory Crewdson, Artspace Books (San Francisco, CA), 1998.

Demonology (short stories), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2000.

The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2002.

Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of stories and essays to periodicals, including Paris Review, Antioch Review, and Grand Street. Associate editor, Fishers Island Gazette, 1988—.

ADAPTATIONS:

The Ice Storm was adapted into a movie and released in 1997.

SIDELIGHTS:

Rick Moody is a novelist whose emergence in the 1990s helped herald a new era in American fiction, a turn away from such "mediagenic writers [as] Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz, [who] once held the limelight with modish novels about fast life in the 1980s," as Time reviewer R.Z. Sheppard noted. In contrast, Moody—along with contemporaries like David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Frazen, and Donald Antrim—slants his work by taking "an extra tweak of the commonplace to turn diversion into gnawing unease," according to Sheppard.

Following his debut novel, 1991's Garden State, Moody gained national attention with his second published work, The Ice Storm. The story is set in upscale New Canaan, Connecticut, in late November of 1973. The Hood family is in crisis, and father Ben copes by drinking and having affairs. Mother Elena is, in the words of Time reviewer Ginia Bellafante, "too obsessed with herself, the I Ching and the writings of Masters and Johnson" to recognize the tumult facing her marriage and its effects on her two teenage children. The kids, meanwhile, eagerly turn to drugs and promiscuity in the absence of a guiding force in their lives.

The author "compresses years of estrangement and disillusion into one night of drugs and drinking, seduction and betrayal, felled trees, blackouts, car crashes—enough mayhem to keep the reader cringing in anticipation of the next disaster," commented Dan Begley, writing in Tribune Books. "But in fact the damage was done before the rain began to fall … when the Hoods formed bonds based on convention, predictable and soulless like the street plan of a subdivision."

Throughout The Ice Storm, Moody uses references of the era, providing "layer on layer of contemporary detail—clothes and furniture, television programmes, articles in magazines and comics," wrote Alexander Harrison in his Times Literary Supplement review. In doing so, the critic continued, Moody has "done his research, but the result can overwhelm the fact that the book is a retrospective; it exists in the present while it deals with the past." Harrison pointed out that a narrator from today's world ("let me dish you this comedy about a family I know when I was growing up") helps set the scene by establishing that "there are no answering machines. And no call waiting. No compact disc recorders or laser discs" in this story.

But there are "key parties" in which wives draw from a bowl the car keys of their male neighbors to determine with whom to spend the night. "Everyone's confused to begin with and, caught overnight in the weather [the titular storm] and their various liaisons, much more confused by the end," according to Ellen Akins. Her Los Angeles Times Book Review piece stated that while the story is "split in perspective among the characters," The Ice Storm is "largely uniform in style, rendered in short sentences, many of them not really sentences but bright staccato beats that hammer home a point or ring a few changes on it or take it one step further." To an Economist reviewer, the "built-in transience" of the constant period references is but a small shortcoming in an otherwise "profound" exploration of human frailty. The Ice Storm was adapted into a movie released in October 1997, with Kevin Kline starring as Ben Hood.

In 1995 Moody produced a novella and collection of short stories released as The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven. Called "a spectacular tribute to the banality of degradation" by Village Voice critic Clair Messud, The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven explores the lives of various denizens of New York City's bohemian East Village. Drugs, rock music, despair, AIDS, and artistic longings intermingle in a way that turns the exotic into the familiar, in Messud's view. "This is a fine but unsettling work," she summed up, "not least because Moody's relation to his material remains unclear. Voyeur and participant, sage and celebrant, he wants to be the man with all the tricks. He captures with piercing clarity the vacuity of his characters' lives but seems, at the same time, to pay tribute to their desperate extremity, in a gesture more social than literary."

Moody returned to the novel with 1997's Purple America, which received considerable critical acclaim. A "rapturous" work about love at the end of the twentieth century, according to Detroit Free Press reviewer Liesel Litzenburger, Purple America shows Moody as "a master at conveying the nuances of a certain sort of stuck, over-reaching, upper-middle-class life—golf courses, scotch-and-sodas, station wagons, tennis socks (with the little colored balls)—as a means of making larger statements." The story concerns Dexter "Hex" Raitliffe, who meets up with a childhood crush as he returns home to care for his invalid mother. In his late thirties, neurotic, alcoholic, and stuttering, Hex is ill-suited for the role as his mother's caregiver. After reuniting with Jane Ingersoll, for whom Hex nursed an unrequited crush during high school, he embarks on a spontaneous affair with her—with unhappy results.

Will Blythe, in his review of the book for Esquire, noted that Moody "manages to deploy all the standard missiles of postmodernism (parody, list making, the exaltation of language, a geek's love of technology, a multiplicity of voices and forms), but the warheads are tipped—miracles of miracles—with compassion for his characters." To Blythe, Moody "is that rare writer who can make the language do tricks and still suffuse his narrative with soul."

Demonology, released in 2000, is a collection of short stories exploring "love, grief and language, set against the backdrop of modern America," according to Alex Gibbons in a New Statesman review. The title entry is a meditation by a man on the death of his sister, a story that may have its impetus in reality; Moody's sister died of a seizure. In another story, "Mansion on the Hill," a deceased sister also figures into the plot. Indeed, wrote reviewer Joe Hartlaub on the Bookreporter.com Web site, "if there is one unifying theme to the stories in Demonology it is the loss of family members," citing not only "Mansion" but also "Hawaiian Night," in which the spectre of a deceased wife casts a pall over a neighborhood party, and "The Double Zero," which deals with a dying boy who comes between two estranged brothers.

One entry that some critics singled out as particularly noteworthy is "Wilkie Ridgway Fahnstock, The Boxed Set." Experimental in form, the story consists of nothing more than a set of liner notes for a collection of cassettes belonging to "a schlemiel who has reached penultimate failure in early adulthood and has nowhere to go," as described by Hartlaub. The cassettes listed are actual songs, and together they paint a picture of their owner. "Absolutely brilliant," decided Hartlaub of this story. Amy Havel, in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, was more reserved in her judgment, saying Moody's experimental pieces are "less interesting and more showy" than his traditionally written stories.

Even without its experimental aspects, Demonology can be challenging reading. "We are presented situations in which the psyche would be rubbed raw, but we are left to imagine the ramifications, the nuances, the complexities," wrote New Criterion critic Max Watman. A Publishers Weekly contributor sensed a "low-grade bemusement" in the thirteen Demonology pieces, commenting that Moody's prose "strains for hypermodern colloquial detachment, but too often misses its mark." But "to Moody's credit," noted Gibbons, the book, "for all its emotional charge, never becomes mawkish."

Moody unveiled details of his own life in his first nonfiction work, The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions. The title refers to a legend regarding a Moody ancestor who wore a veil over his face throughout his adult life in penance for causing the accidental death of a childhood friend. The memoir reveals that "circumstances didn't make a sweet spring of youth" for the author, as a Kirkus Reviews writer put it. Moody reveals that as a shy, awkward boy he endured his parents' divorce and, for a while, had no fixed address. Solace came in the form of reading and from listening to the tall tales told by his grandfather. In a New York Times Web site interview with Bill Goldstein, Moody recalled his grandfather as an archetypical Down East Yankee from Maine who "would just tell us ridiculous fibs on occasion, with great delight and enthusiasm. So there was that kind of love for telling stories around."

The Black Veil covers Moody's years as a struggling writer working at publishing houses while coping with personal demons, including a fear of being raped and a bout of alcoholism. Contributors for Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly both lauded the portrait of a "sympathetic and sensitive" man that emerges from the memoir.

In 2005 Moody released The Diviners, his first novel in seven years. The work is the character-driven story of an epic miniseries, the rights to which are being fought over by agents and studio executives. The one problem, of which none of these eager bidders is aware, is that the script has not actually been written yet. Vince Passaro, in a review for O, the Oprah Magazine, noted that "devastating in its comedy and penetrating in its deep seriousness, The Diviners stands now as Moody's best and most ambitious novel." A Kirkus Reviews contributor, however, observed that "it all adds up (or doesn't) to a bloated book about cultural bloat, an empty look at cultural emptiness," and summed up the book as "a novel that might well have been more fun to write than it is to read."

Moody's next book, 2007's Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas, is "heavily influenced by post-9/11 paranoia," as a Publishers Weekly contributor put it. The three novellas all revolve around characters who are up against some sort of a conspiracy, real or imagined. In the first novella, "The Omega Force," the reader is introduced to Dr. James Van Deusen, a retired government official convinced that there are terror plots being conceived by "dark-complected" foreigners against his Long Island, New York, community. In the next novella, "K & K," the protagonist, Ellie Knight-Cameron, is a lonely, overweight insurance office manager who tries to track down the author of the increasingly violent messages left in the complaint box she set up. Considered by some reviewers as the best of the bunch, the third novella, "The Albertine Notes," is narrated by amateur journalist Ken Lee. A Kirkus Reviews contributor felt it is "the most elaborate and elusive of the three novellas." While Lee is researching an article on the origins of the drug issue in Manhattan that began after a bombing that killed four million in the city, he falls prey to the same hallucinatory drug (Albertine) that is destroying the city's remaining citizens. It is suspected that the city's supplier of Albertine might also be the person responsible for the bombing. Of Right Livelihoods, Library Journal reviewer Victor Or remarked that Moody's "convoluted narrative may challenge the patience of some readers, but those who persist will find it rewarding."

While often compared to twentieth-century writer John Cheever, Moody told an interviewer for Publishers Weekly that his main influences included Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, his mentors at Brown University, John Hawkes and Angela Carter—"and above all," added the interviewer, "Don DeLillo," the writer whose development Moody's most closely resembles.

Moody worked hard to develop his own literary voice. As a neophyte novelist, "I had this idea that the language had to be pretty restrained or nobody was ever going to publish the books," Moody told Goldstein. "I mean, it was just that simple. But I wasn't yet confident enough about the receptivity of the literary community to really let my voice drift into a more natural albeit slightly more hysterical kind of line length. And then somewhere in the middle of writing [The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven] I just sort of hit … I landed on the vein, in a way. And I suddenly realized that it was okay for me to write these long, torrid sentences and that people would still read the work and many people would be really excited by it." Moody added that his goal as a writer is "to make the language express the great variety of human consciousness and how sort of multifarious consciousness is, but hopefully without ever being too abstract."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Moody, Rick, The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2002.

PERIODICALS

Book, January, 2001, Don McLeese, review of Demonology, p. 79.

Booklist, April 1, 1994, Eloise Kinney, review of The Ice Storm, p. 1424; March 15, 1997, review of Purple America, p. 1227; June 1, 2000, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Purple America, p. 1850; March 15, 2007, Joanne Wilkinson, review of Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas, p. 5.

Dallas Morning News, January 24, 2007, Chris Vognar, "Diviners' Author Rick Moody Chills the Notion He Wrote for Revenge."

Detroit Free Press, May 25, 1997, Liesel Litzenburger, review of Purple America.

Economist, June 18, 1994, review of The Ice Storm, p. 98.

Entertainment Weekly, April 25, 1997, Vanessa V., review of Purple America, p. 64; May 17, 2002, "Moody Blues: The Novelist Rick Moody Reveals His Struggles with Depression in the Black Veil, but Much Remains Under Wraps," p. 66.

Esquire, April, 1997, Will Blythe, review of Purple America, p. 50; February, 2001, review of Demonology, p. 38.

Harper's Bazaar, February, 2001, Melanie Rehak, "Suburban Legend," p. 166.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1994, review of The Ice Storm, p. 239; April 1, 2002, review of The Black Veil, p. 473; July 1, 2005, review of The Diviners, p. 705; April 15, 2007, review of Right Livelihoods.

Library Journal, April 15, 2007, Victor Or, review of Right Livelihoods, p. 80.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 7, 1994, Ellen Akins, review of The Ice Storm, p. 15.

Mother Jones, January, 2001, Ben Ehrenreich, review of Demonology, p. 77.

New Criterion, February, 2001, Max Watman, review of Demonology, p. 76.

New Statesman, January 21, 2002, Alex Gibbons, review of Demonology, p. 56; January 23, 2006, "Human Comedy," p. 55.

New Yorker, September 26, 2005, review of The Diviners, p. 147.

New York Times Book Review, June 3, 2007, "Boomtown," p. 26; July 2, 2007, Richard Eder, review of Right Livelihoods.

Observer, July 31, 1994, review of The Ice Storm, p. 20.

O, the Oprah Magazine September, 2005, Vince Passaro, review of The Diviners, p. 180.

People, August 22, 1994, review of The Ice Storm, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, March 31, 1997, review of Purple America, p. 46; December, 11, 2000, review of Demonology, p. 64; March 18, 2002, review of The Black Veil, p. 86; June 10, 2002, "Rick Moody: Behind the Black Veil," p. 38; April 2, 2007, review of Right Livelihoods, p. 35.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 2001, Amy Havel, review of Demonology, p. 189; summer, 2003, Joseph Dewey, interview with Rick Moody.

Time, May 30, 1994, Ginia Bellafante, review of The Ice Storm, p. 65; April 14, 1997, R.Z. Sheppard, review of Purple America, p. 89.

Times Literary Supplement, August 5, 1994, Alexander Harrison, review of The Ice Storm, p. 18.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 16, 1995, Dan Begley, review of The Ice Storm, p. 8.

Village Voice, October 17, 1995, Clair Messud, review of The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven, p. 75.

Writer, June, 2007, Sarah Anne Johnson, interview with Rick Moody, p. 66.