Garden State: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: My Favourite
Review: I have only recently discovered Rick Moody & in a short period have read almost all of his books - this is my favourite. The stories here are reasonably varied in content, & he has a lot of fun taking liberties with form & style & content (what a story should be). These are not necessarily just straight narratives, but play around with ideas of meaningful coincedence & circles of happenings. It's always good to see a writer unafraid of taking risks in order to get at some sort of truth - it's what great artistry is all about (I think anyway). I too, along with the other person who has written a review, like the stories 'Phrase Book' (the girl who took a massive hit of acid) and 'The Apocalypse of Bob Paisner' (a term paper in which a guy flunking out of school relates his life to the Bible). One thing about Moody, apart from everything else, is that his characters here are always wholly believeable. Even if the situations are sometimes extreme, the characters ring true - they are created with a great deal of empathy, & if the reaction to them isn't always empathetic, at least it's with understanding. This, to me, is the most important feature. The last story in the book is quite self-revelatory. It's a neat idea - Moody uses a selection of books from his bookshelf as a 'Bibliography' & footnotes occasional ones in order to explain certain parts of his life. I think it takes a person a lot of courage to expose themselves implicitly like this (but it sure beats a publishers blurb on the back cover). Rick Moody is a very good writer & you don't get too much better in contemporary writing than Ring of the Brightest Angels Around Heaven.

Rating:
Summary: The most boring book about slackers
Review: I read this book because I liked The Ice Storm. I read this book because of the descriptions of what the book was about and the 5 star remarks of various reviewers. I thought, wow... another "Rules of Attraction" something funny, cynical, and stories of passive, troubled youth growing up in the 80's. I thought it was going to be a good read. I was wrong. Wrong. I judged a book because of its descriptions but I should be weary next time. I've never read a book about slackers and 20 somethings so boring in my entire life. Drugs, sex, music, parties, psycho hospitals... those topics should be interesting, fun, sentimental, or whatever to read about. But Moody just bored me and in the end this book should be forgotten. It was highly disappointing and the characters are not worthy. Bret Easton Ellis can at least pull off dispicable and hateful characters that are fun to read about but the dispicable characters in this book I didn't even care for. I just wanted to finish it and get done with it. Just like the characters in this book too stupid to be named, this book is too stupid to be remembered.


Rating:
Summary: A book that makes you think.
Review: I read this book by chance as a project in school. I happened to see the cover of it and got interested, a very fortunate coincidence for me. The book contains a number of stories, and every one is individual. They capture you and immerse you into a big pot of feelings and thoughts, which is extremely hard to get away from. Every story is individual because they all have something special, like one in which a man connects all the happenings in his life to the apocalypse of the Bible, or the one in which an interview is taking place with a girl who took 70 hits of acid in one day and survived with a wacko mind. The stories are not grand or magnificent, but small and commonplace. I instantly fell in love with this book and this author and I can strongly recommend anyone interested in more or less alternative reading to read it.

Rating:
Summary: Novella is the the best in the book
Review: If you pick up The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, be sure to at least read the novella (same name) at the end if you decide you're giving up on the book as a whole. I really liked the first story in the collection, but everything else wasn't that interesting to me. I would find my mind wandering as I was reading the other stories, and I would go back and re-read. The only time this didn't happen was with the novella, which is about different slackers, but it was still interesting. If you read the bibliography at the end and the footnotes, you'll understand where Rick Moody is coming from in the novella to some extent. Not too far from his own experiences. I actually thought reading the footnotes was more interesting than most of the short stories. The booke definitely doesn't hinder me from reading more from Moody, however. At least it's worth a try.

Rating:
Summary: Ummm...What was the Point again?
Review: In "Garden State", Rick Moody tries to pull off Bret Easton Ellis by way of Haledon, NJ and either succeeds brilliantly or fails horribly depending on your viewpoint. The novel has a lot going for it, but ultimately I finished the book out of inertia rather than actually caring about the outcome or any of the characters in it. Like Bon Jovi's ode to the state, I wanted to like this book, but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Rating:
Summary: Ummm...What was the Point again?
Review: In "Garden State", Rick Moody tries to pull off Bret Easton Ellis by way of Haledon, NJ and either succeeds brilliantly or fails horribly depending on your viewpoint. The novel has a lot going for it, but ultimately I finished the book out of inertia rather than actually caring about the outcome or any of the characters in it. Like Bon Jovi's ode to the state, I wanted to like this book, but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Rating:
Summary: A big book trapped in a little book's body
Review: One of the best things about 'discovering' a wonderful writer is reading everything else they've published, not just the one you liked first. Garden State is Moody's first novel. It's a messy story about a (thank God) vanished time. It was really interesting to read, because his subsequent writing just gets better and better. It's bound by a plot at once complicated and sublimely simple. The several main characters, basically nice-people male and female twentysomethings in the 'eighties, can't quite 'leave home,' are are often stoned, drunk, or otherwise debilitated. They sleep late, smoke, party, drive around, play music, fret about their moms, (there's a freakish car accident), experience despair, visit the sick, poke through piles of laundry in search of leggings, hang out, wear black nail polish, have desultory sex, and reflect rather thoughtfully on things while spending a month (one of them does this) or so in a pretty nice mental hospital.There is wonderful yearning for meaning and love -- also oblivion and ecstasy. The whole thing takes place in NJ, which is also used as a symbol of -- something or other. Great sense of place, and a hip sort of warmth and compassion is in there, too. This novel is strange, a little bit difficult to love, but worth the trouble.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful first novel, very dark but comic in it's way
Review: Rich Moody won a Pushcart award for this. Nominations for the award come from editors who would have liked to publish a book, but couldn't usually for commercial reasons. It's easy to see why publishing it at most commercial houses would have been difficult. Moody is a tough and challenging writer, but well worth the effort. It is not just New Jersey that he captures, but a very real group of young people and a very real time in America. I recommend all of his books, but have a special feeling for Garden State.

Rating:
Summary: A fantastic first novel. Read this book.
Review: Rick Moody mentions Astral Weeks in his introduction. There are worse reasons to read a book, I think.

Rating:
Summary: There's "Style" and then there's Rick Moody.
Review: Rick Moody's writing isn't of a "style" as so many would praise. It's pure redundancy mixed with instances of information that is meaningless to a story. I had to FORCE myself to read through the first story of this book. And that was only in an attempt to be fair.

His interjections of special detail (i.e., the kind and color of rug Ms. Rondale purchased in the first story) are not at all "genius" or "challenging". They are distracting and pointless. If they do anything to what might have been a good story, they dismember it one organ at a time.

I won't call it all bad writing - but it certainly isn't the kind of writing that I'd call good. Or recommend to anyone.