Rick Moody, The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions

Sentence for sentence, page for page, this is powerful and original work. Moody’s combination of nervous self-awareness and occasionally biblical eloquence gives his prose a rhythm and bite that few other writers command. Sui generis almost to a fault, the book is hardly a memoir at all, at least not in the conventional sense of sustained dramatic depictions of events from one’s own life. Only two relatively slender portions qualify: Moody’s brief psychiatric hospitalization and a trip he takes with his father to learn more about the Moody family history, in particular Joseph Moody, the nineteenth-century clergyman who inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Minister’s Black Veil,” in which a preacher troubled by vague notions of original sin takes to wearing a piece of black crape over his face in attempted expiation.

Less a memoir, then, and more a meditation on the concept of shame and its role in the formation of personality, the book’s only flaw is that its beautifully wrought parts never truly cohere. The kinds of personal problems Moody experiences, and which he seems to think link him in some way to Joseph Moody (whose own sense of shame is thought to be traceable to his having accidentally shot and killed a childhood playmate), or by even further extension to the crimes of America itself (such as the decimation of its native population and the despoliation of its land), are never discussed in enough detail or with enough objectivity to make such links explicit and interesting. Instead, we are treated to the turbulent thoughts of a fascinating mind, trying and failing to name the specific sins that lie behind its heightened but ultimately shadowy sense of guilt. In this sense, perhaps, the entire book is like the minister’s veil.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Rick Moody

Rick Moody, The Ice Storm

It’s been ages since a work of art made me feel like I needed a shower—not a cold one, either, but a long, hot, cleansing one. The last time I can remember feeling this unnerved by an artist’s sleazy take on the world was when I saw the film Star 80, Bob Fosse’s adaptation of the true story of the murder of a Playboy playmate by her scuzzy, exploitative husband. But at least Fosse had some important messages to convey about the role of pornography in contemporary society and the primitive power imbalances that still so often pass for normal relations between the sexes. The only messages I could glean from Moody’s novel are that longing is seemingly indistinguishable from the longing for orgasm and that adult sex is just adolescent sex overlaid with existential despair. Neither one makes for very enlightening reading.

Set in New Canaan, Connecticut, on the Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving Day 1973, The Ice Storm is larded with numerous pop-culture touchstones of the 1970s that Moody includes in an apparent attempt to give the story some sociological heft. While these references are entertaining (mainly, I suspect, to readers old enough to remember them), they seem incidental to an underdeveloped plot told from the alternating viewpoints of four family members—father, daughter, mother, son—who ultimately all sound like the same character: a contemporary novelist, demoralized by (and angry at?) the atmosphere in which he spent part of his adolescence, who is possessed of a vague desire to somehow turn it all into A Novel of Grave and Significant Themes. Hey, that spells ANGST!

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Rick Moody

David Kamp and Steven Daly, The Rock Snob*s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge

If, as the decidedly non-snobbish David St. Hubbins immortally said, there is a fine line between stupid and clever, there is an even finer one between satire and self-laceration. Such is the lesson this very funny—but also very informative—little book teaches. Kamp and Daly clearly know too much about rock not to be snobs themselves, and they offer up this mostly convincing take on a fundamental canon of rock arcana with a delightfully schizophrenic mix of loathing and love. Most inspired of all are the sentences they concoct to illustrate the uses of snob lingo in context, a few of my favorites being:

His aesthetic may be straight out of the Dust Bowl, but Tom Waits's strangulated vocals have a soupcon of Beefheart about them.

I can’t be bothered with rock music anymore; all I listen to is Miles Davis’s Nefertiti and the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

Let’s put some mellotron over the fadeout to make it really Revolver-ish.

When I saw all those great Stax/Volt players backing up Belushi and Aykroyd, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, David Kamp, Steven Daly, Music

Graeme Thomson, Complicated Shadows: The Life and Music of Elvis Costello

Relying on secondary sources almost surely familiar already to Elvis trainspotters (magazine interviews, radio documentaries, reissue-CD liner notes), and often falling back on tour itineraries, set lists, or studio logs when narrative momentum is lacking, Thomson nevertheless paints a coherent portrait of the once-and-future Declan P. McManus. Surprisingly, the picture doesn’t differ all that much from the effigy used by Costello’s detractors: a restless shape-shifter hungry for approval from the arbiters not only of rock but also of country, popular song, classical, and jazz. In Thomson’s view, of course, Costello is neither opportunist nor arriviste but an original and eclectic musical mind unwilling to be hamstrung by the limitations of any particular genre. Still, Thomson leaves the (in my opinion) essential question unasked and unanswered: If Costello is so effortlessly proficient at so many different styles, why is it that his relatively brief stint under the punk/New Wave banner resulted in work so much more visceral and lasting than that of not just the majority of his rock contemporaries but any of his other musical incarnations?

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Graeme Thomson, Music, Elvis Costello

Paul Clemens, Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir

Although I read this book for an exclusively personal reason (to learn more about the background and experiences of two people very near and dear to me), I found it to be extremely engrossing in its own right. Clemens, a white man in his 30s who grew up just inside the boundaries of a city whose population, well before his birth, was on its way to becoming predominantly black, writes with a mixture of nostalgia and mournfulness about incidents in his childhood that brought the races together in the best of circumstances (a grade-school football team) and the worst (numerous incidents in which young men took one of his father’s cars for a joyride).

As he matures, Clemens becomes fascinated with the literature of race—Faulkner, Ellison, Baldwin, Malcolm X—first as a way of slaking his curiosity about those whom his life circumstances had cast in the role of Other, and then, with increasing dismay, as a way of attempting to plumb the depths of what he perceives as their utter incomprehensibility. (Chief among the targets of his dismay is Detroit’s inflammatory five-term black mayor, Coleman Young.) Clemens never reaches a degree of understanding that satisfies him, and it could even be argued that he loses his own way during the process by becoming consumed with anger over the discovery that his future wife had been raped by a black man.

Overall, Clemens exercises his razor-sharp observational skills not only on his upbringing but also on the history of Detroit and the destructive effects it has had on neighborhoods, families, races, and classes. (In fact, some of his most incisive prose deals not with the racial divide but with the line between the professional classes of nearby Grosse Pointe and the working-class people, such as his mother, who made their livings cleaning Grosse Pointe houses.) In doing so, Clemens manages to make the sufferings of a specific urban landscape resonate with readers anywhere who take an interest in the life and death of American cities and the hearts and minds of those who dwell within them.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Paul Clemens, Detroit