Rating: 
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: These pieces tend to be stunts rather than stories. If you're a reader looking for more than cleverness, you're probably better off passing on this collection. Moody has never been strong on craftsmanship and tunefulness, but some of the lapses and bum notes this time out are pretty startling.
Rating: 
Summary: Another overextended talent
Review: This book is depressingly mechanical in its technique and effects. It's not as bad as some of the other customers here have noted. It's not as if the guy has no talent. It's just that there's nothing remarkable about the talent. There's nothing original, nothing striking. He's earnest, sure, and that should count for something. But he's also trivial. This is a book of trifles. It's a book you can read fast--even skim--with full assurance that you're not missing anything. We have already had enough such books.
Rating: 
Summary: It's all too much
Review: This collection comes beautifully to life in every phrase, every sentence, every story. Take this book to heart.
Rating:
Summary: heartwarming and brilliant
Review: This is a book to cherish, a book to take to your heart. You will no doubt commit entire pages to memory--it's that great.
Rating:
Summary: Experimentation with a human face
Review: This is an amazing collection. Not everything works for me but the pieces that do are amazing, indelible, boundary-pushing. This is experimentation not as gimmick but as a necessary strategy of the heart.
Rating:
Summary: excruciating
Review: This is really one bad book, trendy, safe (as one reviewer has already noted) and completely dispensable. No part of it is worse than the title story. If this has any value at all, it is as time-capsule fodder; it's a perfect indicator of where American literature is right now, and it won't take up as much space as DeLillo's Underworld.
Rating:
Summary: Why won't Moody stop?
Review: This is worthless. Why won't American publishers drop this guy and his cohorts and publish more writers like Daniel Woodrell, Larry Brown, Don DeGrazia, and Scott Philips? Because they're afraid, that's why. They want the hipster dollar. Moody's work, like Kerouac, is a waste of paper. This is self-serving filler. Save your money.
Rating: 
Summary: better than ring of angels
Review: Though endlessly influential from the get-go, Rick Moody's works have evolved considerably. If Purple America felt over-stylized to you, check out Demonology or his subsequent autobiography The Black Veil. They are especially powerful if read in that order. The title story of Demonology alone is worth the cost, and I can believe Moody's claim in an interview that after writing it he has been unable to re-read it. It is a very painful account of his sister's death, thinly veiled in fiction (thin to the point that the narrator comments on the story's autobiographical tint). The reviewers who argue that Moody changes tone too quickly and explicitly gives clues of impending disaster miss the point; the tragedy is a given. The beauty of his prose is in building up the context, prolonging what everyone knows or senses from foreshadowing and from the story's mood, until it reaches the point that he must resign himself to writing the conclusion. It is a beautiful method.
Rating:
Summary: Virtuosity is its own reward
Review: Well I can't say I read all of the stories but I did read, according to the Little-Brown flap, "the astounding title story, which has already been reprinted in four different anthologies [and is] a masterpiece of remembrance and thwarted love." Would have to disagree. The story, which contains many sentence fragments. Such as this one. Such as lists of brand name candy, collected by children on Halloween. Is based, literally, on a pun. Presumably it is based on the untimely death of the author's sister, and the difficulties of fictionalizing such an event. Memories, circulating around the time of Halloween, are jogged by snapshots. It's a clever story, heartfelt. It's not a masterpiece. "Boys" is another piece of piece of pleasing postmodern claptrap, which, while modestly arresting (each sentence begins with the word, "Boys") contains such boners (in the Nabokovian sense) as "the boysmasturbate constantly....three times a day in some cases...at the mere sound of certain words, words that sound like other words....beast reminding them of breast." Excuse me but this I can't imagine-but then Catholicism seems to be a big theme for Moody, and perhaps there is a screw loose that renders my ideas of onanism nonuniversal. In fact, if I didn't mention, most all the sentences also start with "Boys enter the house..." as in (p. 243) boys enter the house carrying cases of beer." Again, a recognizably Catholic theme. Another story is called Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal which, except for the obvious nonpretentiousness of the title, I can't get in to here. "Full of deep feeling and stunningly beautiful language," the flap copy continues, "the stories in Demonology offer the richest pleasures that fiction can afford." Amen. P.S. The book is dedicated to A.L.O., A.M.S., and R.H.S. (I'm assuming those are three lovers who wouldn't want to see their names together on the same page-I think it was Delillo who started the multiple lover dedication rage.)
|
