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Title: The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions by Rick Moody ISBN: 0-316-57899-1 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: May, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.38 (32 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: intelligent, brave and compelling
Comment: This book takes a little while to work its spell on the reader, as Moody gradually earns our belief in the relationship between his own experiences of depression, guilt and grief and his historical, American inheritance -- a legacy of Calvinist self-laceration, certainty of the inherently sinful nature of the human soul, and, most damning of all, our ferocious history of the destruction of native peoples, a taint that seems to have settled deep into the psyche of the land. I'm amazed that the book has been accused of being narcissistic and self-absorbed. In fact, it seems to want to offer a corrective to what can sometimes be a narrowness in contemporary memoir; it wants above all to link the speaker's spiritual and emotional condition to his culture, his history, his family, to find it source in the blood and soil and genes. It's a brave, convincing attempt, and ultimately the image of the veil haunts and troubles, persisting in the mind long after one's closed the book. THE BLACK VEIL is formally ambitious, fiercely self-aware, and it provokes the reader to examine the troubled legacy of American history. I think this is one of the most surprising, riveting memoirs to come along in a long time.
Rating: 3
Summary: italicized portrait of artist as young man
Comment: First off, I'm not a huge fan of Moody's italics. He writes so well that they seem unnecessary; they're the equivalent often of someone jabbing you with a pencil as you're trying to study. This memoir is almost interchangeable from all the others by young writers who tell their story of grappling with broken homes, mood disorders, breakdowns, etc. However, there is almost no emphasis on the author's career, instead we get page after page of quotes of a distant relative, Hankerchief Moody, whose odd life interests the author (although there is never any guarantee from the beginning that they are actually related). While this may sound like a way to keep the book from getting bogged down in too much "I" time, it doesn't really work. When the author stops quoting his relative, he digresses into ruminations about various subjects such as school shootings and William Burroughs.
To be fair, the reader is warned in the beginning about how the writer will digress. You can't say you haven't been warned. But by the time a writer pens a memoir, hopefully he or she is old enough to have pulled many of the threads together. Cliched though it is, Moody does not seem to have "come to terms" or had much closure on the rocky period he describes here. That would have helped. Or maybe just a skilled editor.
Rating: 4
Summary: interesting departure for Moody
Comment: The "digressions" part of the subtitle primarily refers to the fact that this is not only a memoir but also a sort of family genealogy, or an attempt at one. Moody finds that he may be the descendant of a Reverend Moody who was fictionalized as the title character of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil." Digging through obscure histories and travelling about New England in an attempt to find out more about the man behind Hawthorne's self-loathing minister, Moody creates a sense of very powerful parallels to his own struggles with severe depression and drugs. These sections alternate without Moody making explicit connections between the two stories, but the format keeps the pages turning and the reader intrigued.
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Title: Demonology: Stories by Rick Moody ISBN: 0316592102 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 10 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Garden State: A Novel by Rick Moody ISBN: 0316557633 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 02 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Purple America: A Novel by Rick Moody ISBN: 0316559776 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 04 May, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory by Patricia Hampl ISBN: 0393320316 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: August, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Duke of Deception by GEOFFREY WOLFF ISBN: 0679727523 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 February, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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