In the Mood for Moody

by Michael Pelusi

Reading

Anyone familiar with Rick Moody's dense, dark fiction (The Ice Storm, Purple America) won't be surprised to find that his new book, an autobiography called The Black Veil (Little, Brown) is neither chronological nor content merely with Moody's own life story. Even its subtitle, "A Memoir with Digressions," doesn't quite do justice to the book's expansive sprawl. Chronicling not only Moody's late-'80s bout with depression and drug and alcohol addiction, culminating in a stay at a mental hospital, The Black Veil is equally about the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story "The Minister's Black Veil" (reprinted at the book's end) and the similarity of that story's protagonist to a preacher named James "Handkerchief" Moody, who may be an ancestor of the author.

"The book is a commentary on a short story by Hawthorne, which happens to take some really personal turns," Moody says via telephone. "The conventional memoir is about as hackneyed as VH1 Behind the Music. So it was never my intention to make it a conventional memoir, and it was always my feeling if I was going to work within memoir as a form at all, I was gonna blast the motherfucker."

The scenarios (and then some) are presented in compellingly disjointed fashion. "I wrote a lot of it out of sequence.... It took a year, pretty much, of cutting -- I actually cut two whole chapters -- and then weaving, figuring out how to weave stuff in and out and letting the shape congeal."

In Hawthorne's story, a preacher dons a black veil till his death for reasons that remain opaque, just as Handkerchief Moody, also a preacher, did in real life. In much of The Black Veil, Moody describes his and his father's search throughout Maine for clues to the life of the near-mythic Moody, his connection (if any) to both their family and Hawthorne's story, and a biographical sketch that might provide a motive to his strange story.

Eventually, the book itself becomes a black veil; Moody outlines in the final chapter how, even at the book's end, crucial parts of his life will remain untold. "That [chapter] was meant to be a direct, frontal assault on this reality-TV culture that we have right now," says Moody. "The truth quotient in it is minimal. [In The Black Veil] on some level there is truth-telling going on, but there's also a sense of the futility of language."

Rick Moody reading, Tue., May 14, 7 p.m., free, The Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, www.library.phila.gov.

Browse The
October 27, 2005
Issue

Join the
City Paper
Mailing List

24th Annual Writing Contest