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.

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