Rating: 
Summary: Yikes...
Review: I've read a few reviews of The Black Veil in the press, and they were without exception less than good, but I'm still a little startled by the level of hostility this book seems to have aroused in many of the reviewers below. Hey! It's actually NOT THAT BAD! (Sorry I can't italicize in this review; it'd be truer to the whole Moody vibe.) Sure it's self-indulgent and a bit formless, but the whole point of memoir is to indulge the self a bit and see what happens. The Black Veil is not completely successful, but Moody is still a fine writer. As one who is no stranger to the "morbid twenties," I found parts of the book quite moving. I look forward to his next novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Crime against Nature
Review: It is a crime against nature that this book is not yet recognized as a classic American memoir. Moody will be vindicated. This is a book for the ages.
Rating:
Summary: Love It or Hate It, I Guess
Review: It is interesting to peruse the various reviews for "The Black Veil" and to witness the polarity therein; it is a work that inspires either love or hate, but curiously nothing in between. I fall into the former category: I found Mr. Moody's manuscript mesmerizing; partly because I am a huge fan of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and partly because Mr. Moody's prose is elegant, loquacious, and downright beautiful. I thoroughly enjoyed the lists and the litanies, the stream of consciousness vocalizing, the brilliant tendernesses and the startling candor, the disgorging of a troubled soul, all intermingled with a genealogical history and a sense of placement and design. It is a curious journey that moves, page by page, towards a most startling, if not -- and I think this is where some might have trouble -- completely satisfying, conclusion. My own summation of "The Black Veil"? Lovers of the English language should read it. If you are disappointed with its end (which, by the way, I was NOT) then at least value the scenery along the way. It is a compelling ride.
Rating: 
Summary: Good writers, bad choices
Review: It's sad to see such a brilliant writer like Moody turn out such a pompous and poorly executed book. One has to wonder if he was given good advice from his publisher -- he certainly wasn't edited by his editor. This book is destined to be his minor most book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Deeply Dishonest Book
Review: Moody has always been the most narcissistic and cynically careerist of the younger American writers, and this book -- the memoir of a man to whom nothing of special consequence has happened -- makes explicit what was implicit in the fiction. The Black Veil might be subtitled In Search of Credibility, as Moody documents, apparently without realizing how silly it is, his endlessly self-aggrandizing attempts to add weight to an essentially weightless life and body of work -- first by turning a minor drug and alcohol problem into an extended bout of slumming and melodramatic recovery-mongering, then by trying to link his work to that of one of the great Yankee masters. Neither effort yields much. Moody is the John Favreau of American fiction: not the real thing, but close enough to pass. The book is shallow, opportunistic, creepy-cold, and, finally, nauseating. For those of you wondering why his career has taken him so far, I offer two words: Ang Lee.
Rating:
Summary: Neither devil nor angel--
Review: Moody is an interesting writer, bright, dedicated, a hard worker. Trouble is you have to sit there and watch him labor, and you have to bear it. This one is thick and deadly dull, overwrought, less than the sum of its parts. ...Skip this one and try someone you've never heard of.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning and tough and overcooked and victimized.
Review: Moody is brilliant. Don't be fooled by the poor showing here or the stupid attacks in many of the reviews (incl the TNR mess). This is a dense, tricky, complicated book that rewards the reader for every effort made. It's not a pretty book, and it's not an easy book. It's a book parts of which will haunt you for a long time. A gifted writer with extraordinary prospects. And yes, he overwrites, though even at that he's worse (better) than the half dozen other younger writers who think overwriting is a way out for writing today. Speaking DFW, JF, etc etc.
Rating:
Summary: strictly for the adolescent crowd
Review: Moody's not an untalented writer, but his great talent seems to be self-promotion. I read about a third of the way into his latest, just to see if he'd found some new topic besides his unpleasant self-- but this "memoir" may be the book that finally reveals the emperor's nakedness. Every sentence reeks of self-promotion, grandiosity, and an assertion of the author's literary "importance." It's unbelievable and in a way quite sad, because the author clearly can write well and clearly cares about books and literature. But this one made me want to take a bath. I wonder who his friend in Baltimore is.
Rating:
Summary: Ugh
Review: Page by page, sentence by sentence, this is probably the year's most sloppily written work of booklength nonfiction published by a major press.
Rating:
Summary: So-so: A Review with No Digressions
Review: Rick Moody's always been an author I admired. "The Ice Storm," obviously, is his best work in that his ranty style of writing found a perfect counterpart: the Watergate-era '70s. I've always admired his progressive use of punctuation (i.e. the comma, italicizing everything), run-on sentences and generally neurotic way of writing. There's something lyrical and sarcastic there, and it's not an easy way to tell a story--for either the writer or the reader. A style to marvel at, yes, but not always one you love (and one that sometimes dominates the story).
And that's where Moody falters in "The Black Veil," I suppose: outside of it's grad school-esque underlying structure, his memoir takes a whole lot of pages to say very, very little. "The Black Veil" is supposed to be an experimental memoir, in that it's not only about Moody's specific decline into various addictions and psychoses, but also a kind of wide-spread condemnation of America itself. Kind of like "The Ice Storm," except this time Moody's using source texts from the early Puritan days (an endless list of books which he annotates in the back), rather than the commercialism of the '70s.
Sounds intesting, right? Well... it's not, really. At times the source texts are compelling, but usually only in the stylized way Moody uses them (which avoids footnotes or even really telling you where the various quotes come from, other than sometimes italicizing them). It's kind of like in a pretty film (i.e. "Hero") where you find yourself marveling at the shot, rather than what's going on in the story. It's sad, but most of the time, the Puritan stuff is downright boring. The language is hard to get into, and it doesn't blend well with Moody's own story, which, as the memoir goes on, gets dominated by the Puritan stuff. Besides, if you want early American history, just go check out those books. Here, you get it in bits and pieces, which is frustrating within itself.
Why is there so much early New England history and analysis packed into Moody's memoir? Well, the basic idea he came up with is that he's vaguely related to Handkerchief Moody, a man who may or may not have been the central inspiration for Hawthorne's "The Minister of the Black Veil." ... Again, a compelling thesis, but one that is explored and ultimately concluded with about as much satisfaction as those papers you shortchanged yourself through while getting your Bachelor's.
I guess that's what makes this memoir, at the end of the day, one of those books you throw onto the "Back to the Used Bookstore" pile: it's intersting, sure, but there are tons of interesting books out there. And I get it: the themes, the attacks on America as violent and a people of colonizers, etc., I'm not stupid, I just don't really care b/c these themes were explored better elsewhere.
If you're getting your PHD in English or like early American history, along with analysis, get this book. But if you're just into memoirs, esp. addiction-related ones, you may feel as though you've been cheated. "The Black Veil" is much more of an "essay with digressions," than it is a "memoir."
If you want great memoirs, check out Jerry Stahl's "Permanent Midnight," or even Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar," which was probably a minor inspiration for Moody. So I give the book two stars on my scale, which is five stars for a masterpiece, four for Top Tens of the year, three for simply good, two for average, and one for bad (but I don't read bad books).
Two stars. Interesting, but so-so.
|
