The writer Rick Moody is pretty tough on Middle America. In his novels "The Ice Storm", "Garden State" and "Purple America," he pierces the complacency of a suburbia stuck between two centuries.
Rick Moody will be reading at Newtonville Books this evening at 7:30 pm.
You could say the same of his latest book, a memoir. In "The Black Veil", Moody hoists himself up on the slab, and the do-it-yourself autopsy isn't pretty. We follow the writer from his early, awkward childhood, through bad boarding school acid trips, the despair of booze and a New York asylum, then back out, in search of family connections to a Nathaniel Hawthorne character.
In exploring his own brambles growing up and breaking down, Moody is looking beyond his individual plight, into the universal darkness in the American experience.
