The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions

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Summary: Beautiful American meditation
Review: Rick Moody's new memoir is saturated in American history, literature, contemporary culture, the culture of our youth (-- those of us of his generation -- ), Art & the way we think about it, and perhaps, most of all, the ways & means of making a life in this country now. What could be more satisfying or more important to consider than these shared influences. The structure of this memoir is so beautiful, so surprising! This book is a revelation.

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Summary: interesting departure for Moody
Review: The "digressions" part of the subtitle primarily refers to the fact that this is not only a memoir but also a sort of family genealogy, or an attempt at one. Moody finds that he may be the descendant of a Reverend Moody who was fictionalized as the title character of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil." Digging through obscure histories and travelling about New England in an attempt to find out more about the man behind Hawthorne's self-loathing minister, Moody creates a sense of very powerful parallels to his own struggles with severe depression and drugs. These sections alternate without Moody making explicit connections between the two stories, but the format keeps the pages turning and the reader intrigued.

Rating:
Summary: interesting departure for Moody
Review: The "digressions" part of the subtitle primarily refers to the fact that this is not only a memoir but also a sort of family genealogy, or an attempt at one. Moody finds that he may be the descendant of a Reverend Moody who was fictionalized as the title character of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil." Digging through obscure histories and travelling about New England in an attempt to find out more about the man behind Hawthorne's self-loathing minister, Moody creates a sense of very powerful parallels to his own struggles with severe depression and drugs. These sections alternate without Moody making explicit connections between the two stories, but the format keeps the pages turning and the reader intrigued.

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Summary: To Shelve Alongside Fitzgerald
Review: The beuatiful and the damned--Rick Moody, the brightest star of Generation X--has produced an autobiographical masterpiece about his crack-up and descent into depression. In this haunting book, more clearly than ever, we hear his charm, his humanity, his seductivity, his grace, his snap and crackle, his genius.

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Summary: Get It
Review: The book is, of course, darker and odder than Mr. Moody's fiction but, like his fiction, elegant, and maybe even more brilliant. His self-portrait is as intimate as it gets as he takes us along on heartbreaking car trips and to scary family ceremonies and to the sad, sad, sad, sad mental hospital. It is a deft, fresh, spontaneous, very risky, very smart, brave, beautiful, inspired, completely giving memoir.

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Summary: What Are You Hiding?
Review: The books that stand apart from the rest, that are truly memorable, are those that have two elemental features: depth and daring. Great painters are known to spend weeks, even months, preparing a single canvas for a new painting. This is nothing that we notice as art lovers, but it provides a texture to the subject that is enriching. Great art is always daring, it reveals the human situation in ways that is new and disturbing to us. THE BLACK VEIL succeeds immensely in this regard. Moody's premise appears to be that nothing we can do as people can pierce the veil of our isolation; no words speak of our loneliness, no howl can articulate our pain. In revealing frightening features of his depression, his alcoholism, and his fragile psychology, Moody does as much as any writer ever has to illuminate the human soul. And in this illumination we can see, as through a glass darkly, some fragments of our own torment. To denigrate such an endeavor seems both small-minded and mean-spirited to me. Maybe people don't care about Hawthorne, but he is one of the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Maybe people don't want disquieting revelations about fear and sexuality, but these are the revelations that invariably send us into a deeper discourse. America is so good at avoiding such discourse, that maybe resentments lie in the author's attempt to sweep away the veils that occlude us from one another. Buy this book, open it up, open up your own soul, and dare to ask yourself that most piercing of questions: what am I hiding?

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Summary: Purple American Prose
Review: The Ice Storm was a novel filled with product placement--bean bag chairs and books such as I'm OK, You're OK--to infuse it with unearned reality. The Black Veil, on the other hand, has only a few products and is for the main part a self concerned attempt at trying to touch the college-aged reader. It fails. The long sad lament at the end gives the game away. Moody says he's sorry for not writing about his mother; for not including his first kiss; for the many things left out. The list is revealing. Why did he leave out his first kiss? Where is his mother? The heart? Is this supposed to be another boy-searching-for-father story. If so, it doesn't work. We can't get past the weak writing. To sustain a book that connects up literary history with personal history takes good sentences. Moody's prose is inexpensive. It leans on verbose overkill. And it's hard to care. Moody milks his short rehab experience. But it comes across as being a short stay by a rich kid in a world he won't engage. It feels jaded. Unearned. A token trial. All the same you see that Moody is trying hard to humanize himself, to get rid of an inner coldness. It makes you think about all of those who have really suffered; the poor, the meek, those without rich fathers in their new cars to tote them around. Moody has tried to establish himself as a rock-star fiction writer. His main concern is with coolness. He longs to be the cool kid. When in truth the cool kids are the ones who don't care. The whole concept of cool has reshifted. Like so many rock stars, he's a product of the arena system. He shoots not for art but for the charts. One has to wonder why Moody links himself with the Beats. He's the only one who makes the link. See the introductions to his books for self-serving tidbits. There is nothing in his work of the heartfelt love of life that the Beats gave us.

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Summary: Indecent Exposure
Review: There is a certain kind of book that is so brilliant that its brilliance is a form of indecency. This is such a book. Writing doesn't get any better than this.

Rating:
Summary: intelligent, brave and compelling
Review: This book takes a little while to work its spell on the reader, as Moody gradually earns our belief in the relationship between his own experiences of depression, guilt and grief and his historical, American inheritance -- a legacy of Calvinist self-laceration, certainty of the inherently sinful nature of the human soul, and, most damning of all, our ferocious history of the destruction of native peoples, a taint that seems to have settled deep into the psyche of the land. I'm amazed that the book has been accused of being narcissistic and self-absorbed. In fact, it seems to want to offer a corrective to what can sometimes be a narrowness in contemporary memoir; it wants above all to link the speaker's spiritual and emotional condition to his culture, his history, his family, to find it source in the blood and soil and genes. It's a brave, convincing attempt, and ultimately the image of the veil haunts and troubles, persisting in the mind long after one's closed the book. THE BLACK VEIL is formally ambitious, fiercely self-aware, and it provokes the reader to examine the troubled legacy of American history. I think this is one of the most surprising, riveting memoirs to come along in a long time.

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Summary: A brave and searching memoir - top notch.
Review: This is a challenging book and an unusual mixture of memoir and lit crit, pain and humor, truth and deception, addiction and hope, along with real depth. It is being reviled by some and exhalted by others - all promising signs for a book that will last. It seems that many readers who respond angrily want Moody to write just the books they want, in the way they want, not the book he needed and wanted to write. For others like myself, following his career book by book has been very worthwhile and this memoir is a hard, but wonderful addition to the body of his work.