The Black Veil: Inventions Upon a Geneology Book

Rick Moody has established a reputation as the king of adolescent angst, captured most memorably in his novel (and subsequent acclaimed film) The Ice Storm. In The Black Veil Moody revisits old territory, but also daringly branches out in this almost unclassifiable book. Part novel, part autobiography, part history, The Black Veil cuts between Moody's adolescent descent into alcoholism, drug dependency and psychiatric illness, and his discovery that a distant relative, the Reverend John Moody, also suffered from a similar melancholic malady. The Reverent Moody was the subject of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Minister's Veil", and Moody uses Hawthorne's story and his search for the origins of the Reverend's own melancholy as a redemptive quest to come to terms with his own troubled life, and to tell a story "howling inside me about history and remorse and loneliness and madness and the need to capture these somehow". The Black Veil is not an easy book to read. Moody often circulates obsessively around his topics, and the veil of the book's title acts as a metaphor for Moody's own writing and personal outlook on life. It is "a veiled tale, a shadowed lineage" which is at its best in its early brilliant evocation of a tortured adolescence and brilliant evocation of his relationship with his father, and at its worse when it sinks into portentous discussion of post-structuralist literary theory and psychoanalytic theories of melancholia. The Black Veil will not convince sceptics that Moody is anything other than an angst-ridden master of self-indulgence, but it repays close attention as the work of a difficult but often brilliant chronicler of the modern American mind. –-Jerry BrottonRead More