Readers and critics of Rick Moody generally praise the long and lyrical sentences, sarcastic wit, and meandering asides typical of his misunderstood but sensitive protagonists. For Moody fans who have come to appreciate the Holden Caulfieldesque pathos beneath the sense of urgency and big vocabulary in books like The Ice Storm and Demonology, his memoir The Black Veil will offer more of the same. What's different, however, is that this time the protagonist is Moody himself. The book, subtitled A Memoir with Digressions, reads at times like a delicious essay collection outlining Moody's Connecticut childhood (complete with recipes for the perfect lobster roll and significance of the wax bean), and at times like a work of passionate literary criticism. But whether Moody discusses the impact of his parents' divorce, his alcoholic excesses in college and Manhattan, his time at an inpatient psychiatric unit, or his obvious passion for literature, his memoir does what so many current works in this genre do not: it shows the author looking beyond himself, through literature, to a world larger and more spiritual than the one in which he lives.

The titular black veil refers to a Hawthorne story (appended) about a New England minister Moody believes may be a relative. Moody's book is not so much about his quest to research the story of the black veil, despite the trek he makes to Maine to do just that, as it is the account of his personal relationship to that story. While die-hard Moody fans may find the book a surprising departure, those who want to know him more intimately will enjoy accompanying him on this personal and intellectual journey. --Jane Hodges


From Publishers Weekly
Moody's first foray into nonfiction is a curious amalgam of family history, literary criticism and recovery memoir. The title refers to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil," which, according to Moody, is based on the true tale of a Moody ancestor who wore a veil throughout his adult life as penance for accidentally killing his boyhood friend. Having this familial connection, Moody (The Ice Storm; Demonology; etc.) also links it to the sadness he experienced as an underpaid, overeducated 20-something searching for himself, first in San Francisco and later as a publishing assistant in New York. He alternates between explaining Hawthorne's story, describing trips to research his colonial-era paternal heritage and depicting how its legacy of apparent freakishness lives in him. In one bizarre episode, Moody confesses having had throughout much of his mid-20s a fear of being raped, an anxiety that eventually led to an alcoholic breakdown. Much of what Moody discovers in Maine graveyards, in old, coded diaries and in his delusions reinforces his own suspicions about a melancholic family inheritance. He's rarely straightforward, interweaving much of the book with occasionally cryptic passages by other authors, along with his own italicized commentary. This hybrid composition will surely enhance Moody's reputation as a thoughtful prose stylist, though he fends off the temptation of self indulging in the intense demands of self-scrutiny with an occasionally dry and strident tone. By the end of this daring experiment, it's clear that, even as the discoveries mount, forcing the veil of the past to fall away and revealing a sympathetic and sensitive man, Moody still hasn't managed to lose his angst. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Here, Moody talks about his noonday demons and how he surmounted them.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Anyone who has read Moody's fine fiction (Purple America, 1997; Demonology, 2001) will recognize the voice here: painfully funny, heavily italicized, frequently obsessional, frequently riveting. His memoir covers the years of his early adulthood, when he was often depressed and regularly medicated himself with large amounts of alcohol and drugs. He eventually ended up in a psychiatric hospital, which helped him regain his footing. Convinced that his tendency toward melancholy is a family tradition, Moody researches his lineage, finding a kindred soul in Handkerchief Moody, on whom Hawthorne based his short story "The Minister's Black Veil" (all of Moody's chapter titles are taken from this story). This is no ordinary memoir because it seeks to meld the personal and the historical, not always successfully. You would be hard pressed to find a more accurate, more eloquent account of the first, hesitant attempts to find one's place in the world, which are often accompanied by confusion and loneliness. But Moody's obsession with his genealogy and the metaphoric implications of a veil (he even attempts to make and wear one that covers his face) is less compelling. He warns readers right up front: "Obsession has its blind spots, it is occasionally inexplicable, it is worrisome, it is amazing and sometimes charming." So is he. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Thomas Pynchon, author of V, Gravity's Rainbow , Mason & Dixon
"...takes the art of the memoir an important step into its future."


Book Description
In his early 20s, a lifetime of excess left Rick Moody suddenly stranded in a depression so profound that he feared for his life. A stay in a psychiatric hospital was just the first step out of mental illness. In this astonishingly inventive book, Moody tells the story of his collapse and recovery in an inspired journey through what it means to be young and confused, older and confused, guilty, lost, and healed. Woven through his own story, Moody also traces his family's paternal line, looking for clues to his own melancholy-in particular to one ancestor, Reverend Joseph Moody, about whom Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an archetypal story of shame called "The Minister's Black Veil." In a brilliant display that is no less than a literary tour de force, Moody ties past and present, family legend, and serious scholarship into a book that will draw comparisons not just to recent memoirs by Dave Eggers and Martin Amis but to forebears like Nabokov's Speak, Memory.


About the Author
Rick Moody is the author of Demonology, Purple America, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, The Ice Storm, and Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editor's Choice Award. He is a past recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York.

FROM OUR EDITORS

To an interviewer's question about the confessional nature of his writing, Rick Moody responded simply: "I think openness is an important spiritual activity." In The Black Veil, he takes that openness to its most painful limits. In wrenching, yet reflective ways, he writes about an early breakdown, a psychological crisis so devastating that he feared for his life. After his recovery, Moody probed for reasons for his profound depression. Was he perhaps doomed by his family lineage? In his research, he focused particularly on Reverend Joseph Moody, a forebear who, according to Rick's grandfather, was the real-life model for Nathaniel Hawthorne's grim tale "The Minister's Black Veil." This foray into dark family closets ends with surprising revelations. It's no wonder that Thomas Pynchon asserted, "Rick Moody￯﾿ﾽtakes the art of the memoir an important step into its future."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this widely acclaimed memoir, one of the most admired writers of his generation reveals how a decade of alcohol, drugs, and other indulgences led him not to the palace of wisdom but to a psychiatric hospital in one of New York's less exalted boroughs. At once a harrowing personal story and a dazzling exploration of ancestral inheritance, cultural mythology, and the very idea of self, The Black Veil indelibly captures and conveys what it means to be young and confused, older and confused, guilty, lost, and finally healed.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

It is not clear whether Moody has written a memoir or an anti-memoir. As the author of The Ice Storm and Purple America warns, "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." Despite the disclaimer, the writing here seems more distanced than revelatory, with Moody treating himself as a literary construct. A five-day trip to Maine that Moody takes with his father provides the primary narrative thread, as they explore the family's possible connection with the Nathaniel Hawthorne parable "The Minister's Black Veil," which Moody was told was based on a distant relative. Though his reminiscences encompass a pilgrimage to California and a subsequent cycle of substance abuse, nervous breakdown and psychiatric therapy, the reader is not likely to feel close to Moody. A memoirist who maintains that "my past didn't exist except in interpretations of the past" and admits that "language obfuscates as much as it reveals" is more interested in the veil than in what's behind it. —Don McLeese

Publishers Weekly

Moody's first foray into nonfiction is a curious amalgam of family history, literary criticism and recovery memoir. The title refers to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil," which, according to Moody, is based on the true tale of a Moody ancestor who wore a veil throughout his adult life as penance for accidentally killing his boyhood friend. Having this familial connection, Moody (The Ice Storm; Demonology; etc.) also links it to the sadness he experienced as an underpaid, overeducated 20-something searching for himself, first in San Francisco and later as a publishing assistant in New York. He alternates between explaining Hawthorne's story, describing trips to research his colonial-era paternal heritage and depicting how its legacy of apparent freakishness lives in him. In one bizarre episode, Moody confesses having had throughout much of his mid-20s a fear of being raped, an anxiety that eventually led to an alcoholic breakdown. Much of what Moody discovers in Maine graveyards, in old, coded diaries and in his delusions reinforces his own suspicions about a melancholic family inheritance. He's rarely straightforward, interweaving much of the book with occasionally cryptic passages by other authors, along with his own italicized commentary. This hybrid composition will surely enhance Moody's reputation as a thoughtful prose stylist, though he fends off the temptation of self indulging in the intense demands of self-scrutiny with an occasionally dry and strident tone. By the end of this daring experiment, it's clear that, even as the discoveries mount, forcing the veil of the past to fall away and revealing a sympathetic and sensitive man, Moody still hasn't managed to lose his angst. (May 6) Forecast: A 12-city tour to highlight the author's photogenic face and edgy image will help bump sales, but mostly to established fans. New readers will likely be left scratching their heads. Look for an interview with Moody in an upcoming issue. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Moody (The Ice Storm, Demonology) has artfully crafted a genre-breaking standout that interweaves literary criticism and family myths with his own recovery from addiction and depression. After years of abusing drugs and alcohol, a twentysomething Moody checked himself into a psychiatric hospital in Queens, NY. When he reemerged, he realized that he didn't know himself and began to scratch the surface of his identity. Spurred by the hand-me-down tales that his grandfather told about a possible ancestor, Handkerchief Moody (the supposed basis for Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil), Moody traveled the roads of New England with his father to piece together their patrilineal genealogy. This engaging quest covers many miles and has myriad detours. With the same passion that he uses to explore his family history, Moody delves into linguistics, devoting whole chapters to the origins of words such as moody and veil. His lyrical phrases and wry sense of humor masterfully tie together unconventional observations and disparate threads about family history, headline news, and etymology. Though he communicates much about his life, Moody, like Hawthorne's character, shrouds his existence with a filmy veil. The characters in his life (including his father) are painted with quirky details but remain in the shadows, never fully drawn, and it is up to the reader to decide whether the author is at all related to Handkerchief Moody. Yet by using myth and truth, Moody sheds light on what lies beyond the black veil we all wear. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/02.] Jeanne Larkins, New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Novelist Moody (Demonology) reveals an inspired but not pretty picture of his life. Circumstances didn't make a sweet spring of youth for Moody: He was shy and awkward, he stammered, was the beneficiary of a mean divorce, and seemingly had no fixed address. The one constant was reading, along with a link to his father (while his grandfather, if not as ever-present, was another blessed trouble-free zone). The grandfather told stories, and one of the true ones concerned a relation named Joseph "Handkerchief" Moody, who wore a black veil, likely in shame and sorrow after accidentally killing a friend in childhood. The veil becomes central to the memoir—with its sad mysteries, dark implications, and the simple yet not so simple act of hiding who you are if "concealment is essential to identity." Moody's language wells over; italicized words reverberate as emphatically as bassoons; images and feelings throng as he describes days-days and days-down and out to booze, followed by the shift into melancholia, when he expects every encounter to end in his rape: in short, the "hopelessness" that resulted in his admittance into a New York City asylum. A genuine and surprisingly sympathetic character emerges-the jacket copy reads that Moody worked in publishing at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, while he himself says that "I was now a postgraduate, M.F.A.-holding typist and filer of memos"—a mess and a screw-up. He explains how he once turned off the bell on his phone and as a result only later heard a frantic and accusatory series of old messages from his father, trying to reach him after his sister had died from a seizure. With that same father, Moody quests into the family lineage, looking forthemes, myths, and poignancy. Where he got the focus to write through all this is a wonder, though he sure had plenty of material on death, defeat, and dehumanization to work with.

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