Rating: 
Summary: Moody's Best Book
Review: This is Moody's best, most engaging book. Though it is also his most difficult and slippery. I think Moody at his finest--in The Ice Storm, the short stories "The Grid," "Demonology," "Phrase Book," and "Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven"--is probably the best, most genuinley serious American writer going. A lot of his work, however, lets form take over (some of the stories from Demonology are tired experiments). This book, however, formally beautiful, is deeply sad and authentic from start to finish. I think it compares well to Speak, Memory, the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. And I'll tell where the bad reviews are coming from (both in periodicals and by customers): this book is smarter than most people.
Rating: 
Summary: Digressive Nonsene
Review: This is the type of self-pitying tome that Hawthorne, Melville, or any other true New England artist would and could never have been accused of producing. To turn one's ancestry into some sort of self-involved paradigm is to feed the need of the modern middle class fest of narcicism. Give us all a break, please. You are, in the first place, uninteresting intellectually. You are also bouncing a ball repetitively against a backboard that is concave, thus sending the projectile back to you and you alone. The rest of us have laid our rackets down out of sheer disinterst. Trust the naysayers on this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Rick Moody IS the worst writer of his generation
Review: This reads like a rambling 12-step junket. Presumably, this is his attempt to replicate A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and he fails miserably. Mr. Moody says one thing throughout the entire book, and this is what he can say better than anyone on the face of the planet: Rick Moody is sad.
There, I just saved you money and time.
Rating: 
Summary: stunning, incandescent masterpiece
Review: This will endure as one of the great American meditative memoirs. A harrowing work of genius.
Rating:
Summary: Exquisite, moving memoir with literary genius
Review: Whether Ricky Moody is related to Nathaniel Hawthorne or not, he is an equivalent talent. this is masterful, candid prose and entirely unique. Brave enough to admit depression in our haha society...Brilliant and honest. Make a space for Moody, on your bookshelf.
Rating:
Summary: Oh My
Review: Wow. So far two people have reviewed this book and hated it quite a lot. That's kind of unfortunate. Maybe it's a bad book, who knows. Poor Moody. It's hard to write a book like this, I bet. Moody is a fine writer, many of his books, especially his short story ones, are excellent. He has many talents, one of which is an adventurousness. He's not a perfect writer, no, but he is someone whose writing I go and look at and think about. Some of his efforts to climb Mount Pynchon end with him gasping on the lower rocks, but often, when he's not trying so hard to impress, and prefers to engage the heart, then his stuff really soars. If you are getting bored of Moody, you college-age louses, that's your problem. I'm a college-age louse too, and I think he's a good writer. But if you want to find out why he writes with them italics, check out Thomas Bernhard, who has also written a stupendous memoir called Gathering Evidence.
And if you want to see where the dialogue springs from, look no further than William Gaddis.
And if you want to read a young writer with pizzazz, please buy Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, it is glorious.
But for my money, David Foster Wallace or JM Coetzee can't be beat. I love them all.
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