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!

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