The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 19 December 2005
by Rick Moody
In this bleak first novel, Rick Moody brings the depression of a rust-colored New Jersey post-industrial landscape into the lives of the young people who live and/or are trapped there. A couple weeks after leaving her bar band, Critical Ma$$, Alice is living at home with her newly-divorced mother in Haledon NJ. Mom doesn't want Alice there, complicating her own newfound freedom. Dennis is Alice's on-again-off-again boyfriend. His stepbrother, Lane, has just returned from New York, depressed and living at home after some unnamed failure in the big city. Max and L.G. are other friends who round out this lost generation in a particular time (the late 80s?) and a particular place (suburban industrial New Jersey). Everyone is drinking and using various drugs, in the haze that follows undirected high school years. Bands form and dissolve. Relationships build and collapse. Nobody seems to have any direction. Moody, himself, in a critical preface, reflects on the mess of his own life while writing this book. His own struggles with depression and even institutionalization appear in the story. And the book itself reflects a split in the author's own life. In fact, the edgy and jittery writing in the first half gives way to a smoother less exciting prose in the second. Yet Moody's telling of life in the Motel, a low-key mental institution, is compassionate and immediate. The rest of the book is somewhat disjointed (perhaps like its author?), and Moody's attempts to tie up the story in the end seem rushed or convenient. Still, the first two-thirds of the book have an appealingly edgy quality. It is bleak, but energetic.