Listmania
Reviewed by
an Amazon user,
May 9, 2006
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.
|
Certainly not what the movie was!
Reviewed by
an Amazon user,
November 14, 2005
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.
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.
|
sentences that make you swoon
Reviewed by
an Amazon user,
December 25, 2004
i don't understand why exactly, but rick moody seems to make some readers angry. the characters are unlikeable, they say. the sentences are too long. does reading nabakov make the same readers angry? maybe they stumbled onto the ice storm expecting something else, something safe. ignore them.
rick moody taps into the part of the world you only notice when you're really looking. he's funny and he's sad and i would hang out in this book forever, because the way the characters see things makes total sense to me.
"Blundering into the kitchen, he felt sure that it would always be this way, this blunt little diorama of a life with its cessation of miracles would never change--except that it would get worse."
|
A well-written, not-nice story
Reviewed by
an Amazon user,
September 7, 2004
In the late fall of 1973 I was a twenty-nine-year librarian in Dallas, cheering on the downfall of Richard Nixon and learning to write book reviews. As Moody says, it was a very, very different time -- so different I doubt anyone under thirty-five can even imagine it. No call waiting, no cable TV, no AIDS or HIV, no laser printers, no CDs, no Reagan Revolution. The names Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin still meant something. We knew who Rose Mary Woods was, too. But still, New Canaan, Connecticut, was a very different place from north Texas. That fall, Benjamin Hood and his wife, Elena, took the final step toward the break-up of their shaky, unhappy marriage. Wendy Hood, age fourteen, was becoming known as a slut, though she wasn't a bad kid and it wasn't entirely her fault. Her brother, Paul, wasn't having much fun as a seventeen-year-old preppie, either. It was the year the key party came to the upscale suburbs. None of the characters in this painful-to-read novel are particularly likable. You might feel sorry for them, at least some of the time, but you wouldn't particularly want to spend time with any of them, or at least I wouldn't. But Moody keeps you reading, wondering how they're going to screw themselves up next. Making an engrossing story out of unpleasant people and distasteful situations isn't easy, but he manages it.
|
An interesting read
Reviewed by
an Amazon user,
May 26, 2004
I feel that while it's useful to compare novels to films, it's wrong to just say that one or the other is better. So my review will be simply based on what I thought of the novel. I liked Moody's writing style, especially the straightforward depictions of topics that are often somewhat muted in literature, such as sex and drugs. Though some parts of it seemed slow and artificial, overall it presented an interesting picture of the life of a troubled family in the 70s. I think it provides a good example of a family dealing with a crisis and avoiding breaking apart by keeping closer together. I would recommend the novel to those willing to experience some disturbing and thought-provoking moments.
|