Rick Moody grew up in New Canaan, then wrote a hit novel that sliced the town to pieces. Now, he’s got a new novel — and, after that, another new direction

In the three hours I spend with novelist Rick Moody, he expresses emotion only twice.

The first time, understandably, comes after I mention a critic who called him “the worst writer of his generation.” Moody is short, slim, a little pale, but his most noticeable trait is an air of detached professionalism.

While he’s a chatty and congenial lunch date, he remains calm, meticulous and controlled. His hat doesn’t move. His sleeves stay rolled. When he shifts at the table, he doesn’t rock back and forth so much as toggle between two positions, like a light switch.

That changes when I bring up Dale Peck’s New Republic review of Moody’s memoir, The Black Veil. Back in 2003, Moody said he stopped reading after the first paragraph. Writers say things like that, but I never believe them. So, as we sit in a New Canaan restaurant, I ask him if he thinks Peck’s review — it sparked a literary firestorm about the ethics of book reviewing — has helped his career.

“I think that’s a really cynical version of the experience from people who’ve never gone through it,” Moody says. “No one should have things like that said about them. It’s fine to dislike the book, but you shouldn’t kill me 10 different times. I wouldn’t do it to another writer.”

At this point, I say something about one of Peck’s nastier lines. It doesn’t make chronological sense. (“The Black Veil is Moody’s attempt at [Dave Eggers’] A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Purple America is Moody’s version of [David Foster Wallace’s] Infinite Jest.”) Moody gets red in the face, and a growl creeps into his normally even voice.

“That was a really bullshitty thing for him to say,” Moody says, as if he really is hearing it for the first time. “Purple America was begun before Infinite Jest came out.” He pauses. “The really outrageous criticisms from that piece, one has to suspect, are issues Dale was grappling with himself.”

Moody isn’t the worst writer of his generation, but he is one of the most successful — and one of the most perplexing. Instead of exploding onto the literary scene like Eggers or Wallace, Moody has enjoyed a slow, steady burn. He’s never had a New York Times bestseller, but his books are frequently reviewed in the Times as well as in its Book Review.

Moody makes music with his high-concept alt-country band the Wingdale Community Singers with indie-rock multi-instrumentalist and fellow renaissance man David Grubbs. He’s contributed to music blogs (read his exhaustive ruminations at therumpus.net) as well as writing thoughtful liner notes and essays for acts like the New Pornographers. He wrote in defense of unfairly maligned prog-rock concept albums for The Believer’s music issue. He even edited a book of essays about the New Testament.

Even with those accomplishments — and he’s also received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship — Moody has changed aesthetic directions more than any novelist I can think of. For him, it seems, each new book requires a new direction. How else can you explain his newest novel, The Four Fingers of Death, which comes out this week and is probably his most ambitious — a 736-page sci-fi satire that tackles the immigration debate as much as it does the mind-body divide?

Moody’s biography can seem a little conventional. Born in 1961, he lived in a scatter plot of Connecticut towns until, at 15, he headed off to boarding school. Amid this, Moody’s parents divorced — ”We were the first in the neighborhood to achieve that milestone,” he would write in The Black Veil — and his problems began in earnest.

Those problems included marijuana, hash, quaaludes, PCP, LSD, cocaine, speed and heroin, in addition to copious amounts of alcohol and “bad jags of promiscuity” (The Black Veil, again). Moody still managed to get into Brown University (he studied with John Hawkes and Angela Carter) and to get closer to his dream of becoming a writer (he attempted his first novel at 11). He earned an M.F.A. from Columbia University and got a job at a prestigious New York publisher, but his life, physically and emotionally, was no longer sustainable.

What complicates things is where and how Moody’s early novels intersect with his biography. Moody describes Garden State, his debut, which focuses on aimless New Jersey 20-somethings, as “largely imaginative. I got one review that said, ‘He doesn’t really know anything about the working class and he’s not really from New Jersey.’ So I decided, for my next book, that I would write about things that no one on earth could say I didn’t know about.”

That book, The Ice Storm, centers on the Hoods, a rapidly disintegrating family in 1970s New Canaan. Moody packs it with lines like “the stolid riders of the New Haven line, those grailing knights, legendary heads of household” — lines that capture a time and place and that undercut them. Moody’s favorite way of doing this, as in the novel’s famous “key party” set piece, is to show how sex-crazed his characters are. Except that’s not quite right, since no one in The Ice Storm seems that motivated. They’re more sex-dazed.

Moody returned to this material in The Black Veil. Reading it next to The Ice Storm, one is surprised at how many incidental details they share: Wendy Hood gets spanked with a brush (non-bristle side), just like Rick; Rick’s father prescribes Cream of Wheat for a stomach ulcer, just like Benjamin Hood.

But The Black Veil’s larger goal is sorting out the truth about Joseph Moody, a possible veil-wearing ancestor who inspired one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous short stories, and about Moody’s own battle with addiction. It’s not a blow-by-blow memoir, as most of the emphasis falls on Moody’s mid-1980s breakdown, which led to some time in a psychiatric hospital and to his eventual recovery. It’s also not for everyone — see Dale Peck’s take — but Moody knew that going in.

“I definitely thought at the time of The Ice Storm movie that I would use the infiltrate-and-double-cross model,” Moody says. “That was always my plan. And I did. The Black Veil is the endpoint of that process, when everyone said, ‘What the fuck is this guy doing?’”

About that movie: When Moody published The Ice Storm in 1994, it did well for a literary novel. But it wasn’t until 1997, when Ang Lee adapted it into a widely praised film, that the novel, and Moody’s career, really took off.

In some ways, it seems Moody is still trying to live that novel down. Before our interview, I stopped by the New Canaan Library, which carries two sets of Moody’s complete works, each with a “New Canaan Author” sticker on the spine. When I asked the librarian what she thought of Moody, she went straight to The Ice Storm — and, technically, straight to the movie, scenes of which were shot outside the library.

So it makes sense that Moody tries to distance himself from the novel: “It’s just not written very well. I feel like it was the best I could do at the time and I’m glad people like it and I think the feelings are genuine, but the language is primitive.”

This idea of language is crucial to understanding Moody’s writing — and to tying his various books together. “A certain idea of language is implicit in all of my books,” he says. “I figured out how to be the writer I wanted to be in The Ice Storm’s third section — using a longer line and a more complicated surface to try and convey consciousness.”

Getting Moody to gloss this point isn’t easy. He’ll say things like: “I would like to save lives. I think literature can do that.” The hard part is getting him to say how.

“A longer line seemed more evocative of how I experienced the world,” Moody says. “It suggested how recursive and contradictory consciousness is — how it’s an effect of culture.”

But is that true of everyone’s consciousness?

“Perhaps just mine, but I doubt it. I think I’m being more honest about how people think and feel. The minimalist or realist line is easier to read on the page, it’s more felicitous to ADHD-style readers, but I think people are more paradoxical and complicated than that prose style suggests.”

The most tempting adjective to describe Moody’s style, given his suburban roots, is “sprawl.” In The Black Veil, he writes: “Readers in search of a tidy, well-organized life in these pages, a life of kisses bestowed or of novels written, may be surprised: My book and my life are written in fits, more like epilepsy than like a narrative … ” That ellipsis obscures another 112 words, and this sentence demonstrates not only Moody’s style, but also his larger narrative approach.

Maybe Moody’s biggest strength — or maybe his biggest weakness — is an ability to pick up a strand, drop it, kick some dirt over it, circle around it a few times, set up your intellect and your emotions, and then yank that original strand back to your attention. But to call this sprawling is to misread Moody’s novels. Yes, there are digressions, random characters, plot lines to nowhere, but Moody makes sure they are carefully ordered — and, as carefully, disordered.

This approach surfaces intermittently in The Ice Storm, which includes tangents, a few stylistic appropriations (an actual weather report) and chapters that rotate between four different viewpoints. Moody has amplified that even more in his more recent work, especially when it comes to the idea of showcasing language while admitting it can’t really represent anything. He seems to be, in other words, succeeding in his mission to “infiltrate and double cross.”

Still, it’s difficult to pin Moody down. He laments the declining importance of experimental literature. “Large publishers used to publish unusual work and market it a little bit,” he says. “Because they did, books got out into the culture and made an impact on how readers read.”

Yet Moody insists the size of his own audience doesn’t matter. When I ask if it bothers him that Purple America — his first post-Ice Storm novel and his first novel to adhere fully to his ideas about language and consciousness — has dropped out of sight, Moody says he’s OK with that.

“I think it’s a great book,” he says. “People can respond any way they want to respond. There’s a vital and supportive cult-sized audience that’s willing to go where I go. The rest of them come and go depending on how commercial each thing is. And that’s fine. I can live with that.”

Moody turned in the final draft of The Black Veil on Sept. 10, 2001. The next morning, he sat in Washington, D.C., serving as a judge for the National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. From the NEA offices, he could see smoke rising from the Pentagon. For his next novel, Moody knew he needed to change directions again.

“After 9/11,” Moody says, “I really wanted to deal with the culture as a whole instead of just navel-gazing. There was no reason beyond the obvious reason, and the obvious reason is that I became much more politically engaged.”

Starting with The Diviners, Moody turned to the self-sustaining and self-assured tradition of the Big Fat American Novel. Set just after the 2000 election, The Diviners focuses on the behind-the-scenes drama that accompanies a new TV series — ”a multigenerational saga” about the history of water dowsing. Within this loose framework lives an enormous cast of characters and voices — actors, agents, bicycle messengers, an autistic child — but what unites them is how little they care about the external world. “Who actually looks at the towers?” Moody writes in one of The Diviners’ most meta passages. “The towers don’t make you want to write a sonnet. They don’t make you want to dance. They make you want to write a cost-benefit analysis.”

Moody’s new novel, The Four Fingers of Death, contains even more meta flair. Actually, it contains more everything.

Each of Moody’s novels has been longer than the last, and The Four Fingers of Death needs every page it can get to set up its conceit: a 2025 novelization of a 2025 remake of a real movie (1963’s The Crawling Hand) — and this doesn’t even account for the introduction, afterword and notes supplied by the novelization’s author, Montese Crandall.

In 2025, America is plagued by disease, addiction, fuel shortages, monsoons, a unionizing homeless population, the rise of X-treme lacrosse and, most of all, a ravaged economy. Gated communities secede from their states. America’s boom industries are Tasers and duct tape.

In an attempt to rally the national spirit, NASA, which now depends on officially-licensed suppliers and corporate hand-me-downs, launches a mission to Mars, and Book One of the novelization takes the form of Col. Jed Richards’ “Martian blog.” Moody’s space includes mental disorders and kinky sex, and the Mars mission quickly falls apart.

The only thing that survives is Richards’ hand, down one finger and now with a devastating new disease. Book Two returns to Earth (to Arizona, actually) for the disease’s fallout, which affects, among others, a stem-cell theoretician, a debauched and defrocked politician, some quasi-rebellious youths and a cognizant chimpanzee.

This summary makes The Four Fingers of Death sound gloomier than it should. It’s a terrifically funny book. (Richards’ “one giant leap” moment is scripted by a “NASA subcommittee on first utterances”; he also has to sign a contract forfeiting any right to the phrase.) It’s also extremely literary and genuinely affecting. By the end of Book One, Moody has introduced, rounded out and killed off more characters than many novels do — and we still have 404 pages to go.

Moody dedicated The Four Fingers of Death to Kurt Vonnegut and drew inspiration from B-movies like The Crawling Hand, which he remembers watching on WPIX during weekend visitations. Still, Moody says he’s “not interested in making a contribution to science fiction. I did have to learn a lot about rocketry — I needed to know a little bit just to blast them off. But my themes are still my themes.”

A more important influence on The Four Fingers of Death, then, is something like William Gaddis’ JR, the urtext of postmodernism. (“I read it everyday,” Moody remembers, “read it like a comic book I loved it so much.”) One of The Four Fingers of Death’s most brutal, action-film-y sequences also includes a characteristic Moody riff on language and meaning. And then there’s the book’s larger political import. “A novel that contains a place as big as the United States had better be big,” Moody says. “The Four Fingers of Death is obviously hyperbolic. But I think America’s days as an economic powerhouse are nearly done — if not by 2026, then the generation after.” Seen in this light, The Four Fingers of Death becomes a commentary on what it means to be an American, both for good and for evil.

After lunch, Moody and I walk to downtown New Caanan, which he describes as “more preppy and more crowded” than the one he recalls. He’s agreed to show me some of his childhood haunts, so we head for his black station wagon. There’s a car seat and toys in the back. Moody’s new fatherhood — he and his wife had a daughter last year — has already made an impact on his art.

Not surprisingly, that means Moody is ready for something new. “With The Four Fingers of Death, I was doing the revisions in the two months after my daughter’s birth, and I knew immediately this was not the way I was going to work in the future.” His new fiction will be “a little more serious, a little less antic. There will still be a political subtext, but I want to do it in the context of a family narrative.”

It’s funny to hear him describe the relationship between parenting and writing since, for a long time, one stood in the way of the other. “I thought domesticity was going to slow me down,” Moody says. But after his sister died unexpectedly, which he movingly depicts in his short story “Demonology,” Moody became an active uncle to her children and reevaluated his priorities. Being a father also helped Moody become more compassionate toward his own parents. “I now feel like they did the best they could.”

We turn on to New Canaan’s Valley Road, and Moody shifts into the role of friendly tour guide — there’s the graveyard where he smoked stolen cigarettes, there’s Silver Hill psychiatric hospital (“Silver Meadow” in The Ice Storm). When we get to where there was once a short road connecting his family’s house and a few others, we find three McMansions, each with its own gated drive.

Moody was prepared for this. In fact, the ice storm that inspired The Ice Storm ended up trashing his old house — the pipes burst, the walls molded. Within months, the Moodys moved to a new house. Moody doesn’t know that house’s exact location, but he’s game to find it.

We navigate New Canaan’s twisted back roads, surrounded by overgrown trees, crumbling stone walls and cars with mortgage-like monthly payments. As he squints at mailbox numbers, Moody admits he’s surprised to hear my favorite part of The Four Fingers of Death is the first, Mars-bound section. “It’s so much less interesting to me than Book Two,” he says, and, when I ask him why, Moody starts ticking off an itemized list: “Multiple points of view, multiple voices, more interest in consciousness …”

He finds it, a yellow two-story just off the road. We pull into the empty driveway. Moody grips the wheel and leans forward, a big, dopey grin playing across his features.

“Yeah, this is it. Wow. Yup. That’s it. That’s the other house. … Wow, that’s weird.”

There’s a long silence punctuated only by the clicks of the turn signal.

Questions or comments? Email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Share this story:
Facebook |Twitter |Digg |Reddit |Stumbleupon

Comments

Add New Search

Anonymous Moody Fan  - corrections     |2010-07-29 17:43:40 In the print edition, the caption to an image from The Ice Storm misspells Christina Ricci's name. A second image comes from Zach Braff's Garden State, but that movie has nothing to do with Moody's Garden State. Reply 1   0

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Website:
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."