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A novel about a strange time in a strange place
“The Ice Storm: A Novel
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-03-15.
Rick Moody's novel, The Ice Storm, offers a wonderful trip through the emotional landscape of affluent New Canaan, Connecticut circa November 1973. New Canaan was, and still is, one of the bedroom communities surrounding New York City. And like the other communities in the area, New Canaan is somewhat unique in America due to a combination of its tremendous, anonymous affluence created by the New York financial district, and an exceptionally disjointed lifestyle due to the long hours worked in the City and the daily 90 minute commutes from home to the train station via car, a train ride into the city and eventually a cab, or subway ride, into the financial district with the process reversing itself in the evening.
I did not grow up in New Canaan, but during this time period I lived relatively close by and visited frequently. I am also the same age as one of the book's protagonists. Based on my personal experience, Moody's novel does a stunningly good job of capturing this time and place. All too sadly, I remember many incidents from this period that are eerily similar to the fictional events that occur in the book. (Apparently I am not alone in appreciating the verisimilitude of the book, I was attending my prep school reunion in 2006 about 100 miles away from New Canaan, when a classmate stated out of the blue, I was from Darien, [a town near New Canaan], if you want to understand what my life was like before I left for school, read The Ice Storm.)
The book is centered upon the dissolving family nucleus of the Hood family, Benjamin & Elena Hood and their two teenage children, Paul and Wendy. Also profiled, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, are the Hood's neighbors down the street, the Williams family, Jim & Janey, and their two sons, Sandy and Mike.
Aside from the human characters in the novel, there is another powerful, yet unspoken character in the novel, and that is the time and place of suburban Connecticut in 1973. In the establishment bastion of suburban Connecticut, where the social order is an essential part of the fabric of life, deep and profound turmoil is upsetting the status quo.
America had, for all intents and purposes, just been defeated in a war for the first time in its history, when the American forces unilaterally withdrew from Vietnam earlier in the year. Also for the first time in its history, American's were watching an American President being toppled by his own corrupt actions. The Watergate affair was a major story in the news, and Richard Nixon would resign in less than a year.
The status quo is crumbling as the anti-war movement winds down and relative tranquility returns to mid-1970's America. However, the social fabric and contract that have held the country together since the Depression in 1929 is crumbling. Single-parent families, the relevance of marriage, civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights are all entering the social consciousness. Entwined in this confusion are the late baby-boomers, now high-school age teenagers, and their parents who were born late in the Depression and during World War II, now both attempting to cope with the upheaval created by the early baby boomers who fueled the upheaval.
For the adults (Benjamin, Elena, Jim & Janey), who presumably married in their early twenties, and had predictable career paths mapped out, there is both frustration and envy with the younger anti-war adults who have both refused to follow the status quo, and who also seemed to be having a far greater degree of freedom in their lives. The adults in The Ice Storm are suffering mid-life crises, yet they have not even reached their mid-thirties. The adults engage in awkward experimentation with extramarital sex and drugs that is stunningly juvenile in both its awkwardness and the impetuousness with which their actions are under taken.
For the teenage children (Paul, Wendy, Sandy & Mike), not only must they cope with all of the usual pressures of adolescence, but an enormous set of expanded freedoms, with greatly liberated societal attitudes towards sex and drugs, and virtually no guidance or expectations as to how to manage these new freedoms. In addition, they suffer largely silently through the unexpected second adolescence of their parents. They are teenagers adrift to a far greater extent than is normally the case. They lack the societal focal point that defines both earlier and later generations, whether it be the Depression, World War II, the anti-war movement, or for later generations, the focus upon personal growth and consumption during the Reagan years and beyond. A level of ennui and detachment sets in among the teenagers, that is generally only seen after mass traumatic events such as war, which in some respects could be considered to be the theme of this work.
Literally and metaphorically, The Ice Storm is a book about missed connections: between husbands and wives, siblings, friends and ultimately generations. On a literal level, it is the last generation without an unending supply of consumer electronics to control movement and actions. In 1973, there were no cell phones, pagers, answering machines, computers, VCRs or even cordless phones, while the three networks and a smattering of independents were the sole providers of television entertainment. Seemingly time moves much more slowly and events happen far more randomly than is the case in contemporary society.
Moody, who would have been twelve at the time of the events he writes about in his novel, must have been an amazingly precocious child as his observations at every level are exceptionally astute. I have one minor criticism of the book, which is that some of the characters begin to engage in rather kinky sexuality that is more a product of the 1980's, and Mr. Moody's own generation, rather than that of the earlier generations in his book, where large doses of pre-marital and extramarital sex, in and of itself, was heady stuff in the 1970's.
In summary, if you are interested in peering into affluent American suburbia during the aftermath of the wild social upheaval of the 1960's, The Ice Storm is the next best thing to having lived it.
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1 of 1 members found this review helpful.
A TALE OF A DYSTOPIC SUBURBAN AMERICANA
“"Be careful what you wish for. You might get it".
An amazon user wrote this on 2008-01-28.
Wise words that came to acquire a new meaning as the baby-boomers' children were entering the 70's. Bell-bottoms and mutton-chops were the cutting edge of fashion; Nixon's lies (and not his Kissingerian real-politics and crimes against humanity) were what finally cost him his office; polyester was more expensive and desirable than natural fibers; America was fighting another youth-grinding senseless war - and (for the first time) loosing badly. The swinging sixties came and gone and left behind only discontent and drug habits; New Heaven, Connecticut was Suburbia having everything it had wished for; every morning waking to the American Dream - only to find it hollow and wanting. And there was an ice storm brewing in the horizon. Would its whiteness make everything pure again? Would its crystals make things clearer?
I picked the book after of greatly enjoying Ang Lee's MASTERPIECE movie. I agree with most other reviewers: the movie was much more tight and effective - and, in the end, a crisper experience. I can understand how RICK MOODY's writing, with its long-winded phrases, rich likenings and not so subtle metaphors, may seem a bit dated to the 1.3sec zapping generation. However, I think that a slow, joyful reading is needed to do justice to this book.
RECOMMENDED!
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2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
The writing alone will keep you reading--but is that enough?
“I was paying particular attention to how Moody developed the characters and laid the groundwork for plot while maintaining a sense of momentum.
An amazon user wrote this on 2007-06-20.
The structure of the book is aided by the pending ice storm that offers a sense of time and place in the novel as well as a sense of movement. The reader knows that the storm will affect the characters and we suspect that it will play a role in the unfolding plot. The storm helps to pace to the novel and Moody moves back to it often as he introduces characters and their particular hang-ups.
The book needs the storm, mainly because the real movement of the book is not immediately obvious. Without the storm, the book would seem to dwell too long on disparate characters. Though the characters are related to one another and live in the same community, the real tension in their relationships and the pending resolution of that tension is not known until the final third of the novel.
Moody also keeps our interest by injecting the text with amusing trivia drawn from popular culture and sex.
And the way in which Moody writes helps to move the text along. Moody likes long sentences full of dependent clauses. He likes lists. He likes short, declarative sentences. Likes fragments.
In the first half of the book, I did not know why I should continue reading. The moral and spiritual bankruptcy of middle class America is well documented. I have no particular interest in the topic. If I were not on the plane, I might have put the book down. But once the characters reached their crisis, things started heating up. I like what Moody is doing and I am curious to read some of his other work, though I suspect (given his reputation) that "Ice Storm" is not his best.” -
2 of 4 members found this review helpful.
Listmania
“Glib. While I feel for the suburban "lives of quiet desperation" angle, however shopworn, here it feels trite and slightly exploitative. Moody makes lists in lieu of description. Maybe this is a comment on the consumerism of the culture he's limning. But it comes off as lazy, as if he did a lot of research to come up with all these pop culture references and instead of integrating them just ticks them off. Even if he lived in that place and time he would have been younger than any of his characters. I was Wendy Hood's age in '73, living in a town next door to New Canaan, and I well remember that ice storm, when we were without power for a week, when a sofa caught fire in our house after using the fireplace non-stop for days. It's not that Moody gets the details wrong exactly, but they feel researched rather than lived, like the over-obvious production design of a mediocre movie. I don't remember key parties, I can't imagine my parents or their friends being remotely that adventurous. And the kids seem if anything a shade naive sexually. I came to the book long after the movie, which somehow did manage to get a lot of idiosyncratic details right. Little things like the mesmerizing patterns of the electrical wires along the train lines or white collar suburbanites using well worn trails to cut through the woods to the neighbors'. The book was a disappointment.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2006-05-09. -
2 of 3 members found this review helpful.
Certainly not what the movie was!
“I had seen the movie, well before reading this novel & I was very much a fan of the movie. The book however was a bit different to the movie & I found that I often got lost within the story of it. I guess it was just lucky that I knew it from watching the film. The movie was concideribly better & that doesn't happen very often, which is why I wanted so badly to read the book.
An amazon user wrote this on 2005-11-14.
Overall I did enjoy this book, I love the style of writing Rick has & I did love the characters, they were real. I love the setting of it all as well. I could see the town, I could feel the tension.
A good read, but does jumble around a bit, I found. ”
