Rating: 
Summary: Shameless Self Promotion/Cover with Black Veil
Review: "Every young man at some time or other wonders whether he can be a saleman. Almost every man, when he is young, daydreams about making a big sale." All in itlaics. This is typical Moody bombast and it is the main stuff of this so-called memoir, although one assumes that a memoir--even with digressions--is going to provde us with memories. Is this true? Do all boys want to be salesmen? Really. This is typical of Moody. Instead of writing deeply, with complexity, of life, he skims quickly; he provides grand statements, struggling to unite himself with the rock/drug /leterary world, with the wider world of pain. Perhaps he wanted to be a saleman so much he projected, and projects, outward that we all do. And what do salesman do? They present product to the world. They hawk. They bend the needs of the mark. The huge leap, and the sales pitch of The Black Veil, is the connection between Moody's life and Hawthorne's. A grand insecurity rides under all of his work. He is a classic grandiouse poser (see Robert Bly's Iron John for the type.) If you want good drug anguish, read Burroughs. Burroughs went deep into the dark and made art. Life is short. Read the real thing. When Moody turns to Burroughs in the book it becomes clear that his modus operandi is to drop the name of some hip figure, hold on to it for dear life. In a other forms, he did the same in his recent review of Neil Young's biography. Or his Details interview with Ethan Hawke. Moody is always the red hot center. See the intro to The Paris Review Book of Beat Writing. Examine it with care. Who is the central figure to that introduction? Not the Beats. Rick Moody. Here's another typical Moody line: "There was a writer who slew his own wife, in obscure circumstances." Why the world 'slew?' Does it lend the sentence a deeper feel--a grander sound? Does it force the sentence into the literary. This is standard Moody. Avoid the clear, the hard, the truthful, the work involved in making art. Write six books in six years. Who falls for these stunts? Many reviewers, and young readers. But in this, his first non-fiction book, it was impossible to turn away from his method. Kakutani's review in the Times was dead-on. The anger you hear is the sound of good writers being ignored.
Rating: 
Summary: I wanted to enjoy it...
Review: ...and I did read the book from cover to cover. I was captivated by the interview that Moody did on NPR's Fresh Air and thought the book would offer more of the same. But where the radio interview offered an honest, intriguing look inward at depression and substance abuse, Moody's book was all over the place. The problem with the book wasn't so much a lack of restraint as a lack of any unifying theme.
I was fascinated by the premise of an author searching his family tree for clues to his own identity. Add to that Moody's writing style--dense, detailed, and intricately designed--and it certainly looked promising. I kept thinking that the ever-lengthening sentences, the eclectic array of allusions and references, and the somber subject matter would eventually pay off, but the book ended before this happened.
If this is starting to remind anyone of Faulkner, you're not far off; Moody's writing style has a lot in common with Faulkner on the surface. The two writers sound alike in a superficial way; however, where Faulkner eventually weaves his themes together in a way that is awe-inspiring, Moody just keeps on relating one esoteric (though well-worded) remembrance after another, with seemingly no reason for doing so.
I suppose all this could be easily explained away with the thought that this is a memoir, not a novel. Even so, by the book's end, I was desperately wishing someone had made free use of an editing pencil. It took a while to adjust to run-on sentences which composed entire paragraphs, which cover two and a half pages apiece. But near the end of the book, as Moody describes a visit to a rock quarry and then goes off on a purposeless tangent about concrete, I had had enough. I finished the book, but mainly so I could justify rendering a fully informed opinion on it. The Black Veil may bill itself as a memoir, but it best serves the function of a journal--a place to jot down all the disparate ideas that need to be recorded, so they can be used to better effect later.
Rating: 
Summary: Another Masterwork from the Master
Review: A century from now, this book will be on all the reading lists, and the kids who have to read it will probably groan, but they'll all be wrong. This is not a book for kids, though. This is a book for the true adult. It delves deep, and requires courage of the reader--just as it required astonishing courage of the writer.
Rating:
Summary: a complicated man
Review: and a complicated artist, although he doesn't pretend he has all the answers. a lucid (and surprisingly funny) account.
Rating:
Summary: Dazed and Confused
Review: As an earlier reviewer noted, Hawthorne must be rolling over in his grave. But so must Nabokov. The publisher actually has the nerve to compare Moody's pseudo-art with Nabokov's SPEAK, MEMORY! Do yourself a favor: Read a well-written memoir by someone whose story is worth telling. Open Moody's book, and you'll likely be aware of an irritating high pitch. I'll tell you what you're hearing: a grown man whining.
Rating:
Summary: One Star Too Many
Review: Before you buy this book, I suggest that you go to the New York Times' website and read Michiko Kakutani's insightful review of why Rick Moody's new book would be a waste of your hard-earned money. I only wish that I had seen her review first.
Rating: 
Summary: italicized portrait of artist as young man
Review: 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:
Summary: Intimate & Humane Voice
Review: Give this unusual, original book a chance to work its charms upon you. It may be worthwhile to remember that most original work happened to meet with scorn within the confines of its own contemporary moment. What makes this work such a happy departure from so many of the memoirs currently offering static on the cultural airwaves is this: Moody offers the wisdom of retrospect, along with a delight in language so palpable that, as you close the book on the last page, you'll have the sense that the universe has become a more vivid place. This work will speak to anyone who has spent any time in the deeper vales of literature or rebellion. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: bracket the naysayers-- this is a gorgeous, important book
Review: i'm astonished by the initial disparagements of rick moody's new book, and the alacrity with which readers peg him as self-absorbed, full-of-angst, &c. he's neither of those things; The Black Veil strikes me as a work of tremendous bravery and honesty. most moving for me are the implications of the book's genealogical project, which sort of extraordinarily problematizes precisely the sort of isolated self-interest of which moody is so weirdly accused. the book seeks to imagine a relation between not just one generation and its immediate antecedent, or one generation and antecedent centuries previous, but a relation between one person and a world which itself exceeds this straightforward mode of narrative time. this, as an art, seems at once both ancient (one could say, with an ear toward the old testament, almost biblical) and unrecognizably new-- hence, perhaps, so few people knowing what to do with this work. the black veil takes the individual person as a point of departure for a new conception of self and interrelation which seems a challenge to both readers and other writers alike. this is no more an ordinary memoir than it's an ordinary genealogy, than it's an ordinary digression. the book, in its local (predictably exquisite) details (e.g. some of the most sensitive descriptions of the Maine landscape since Jewett), and more importantly, its larger outline, is an act of love-- tho a love provocative (and radically ethical, and daring) in its glimmering unfamiliarity. read it read it read it read it read it.
Rating:
Summary: bracket the naysayers-- this is a gorgeous, important book
Review: i'm astonished by the initial disparagements of rick moody's new book, and the alacrity with which readers peg him as self-absorbed, full-of-angst, &c. he's neither of those things; The Black Veil strikes me as a work of tremendous bravery and honesty. most moving for me are the implications of the book's genealogical project, which sort of extraordinarily problematizes precisely the sort of isolated self-interest of which moody is so weirdly accused. the book seeks to imagine a relation between not just one generation and its immediate antecedent, or one generation and antecedent centuries previous, but a relation between one person and a world which itself exceeds this straightforward mode of narrative time. this, as an art, seems at once both ancient (one could say, with an ear toward the old testament, almost biblical) and unrecognizably new-- hence, perhaps, so few people knowing what to do with this work. the black veil takes the individual person as a point of departure for a new conception of self and interrelation which seems a challenge to both readers and other writers alike. this is no more an ordinary memoir than it's an ordinary genealogy, than it's an ordinary digression. the book, in its local (predictably exquisite) details (e.g. some of the most sensitive descriptions of the Maine landscape since Jewett), and more importantly, its larger outline, is an act of love-- tho a love provocative (and radically ethical, and daring) in its glimmering unfamiliarity. read it read it read it read it read it.
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