Novella is the the best in the book

books:


	• Garden State: A Novel Rick Moody Back Bay Books, 1997 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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Mixed Review

This book was very interesting to say the least. At first it was hard to get into the beat of it. Rick Moody left many things in this book unexplained. A lot of times I was confused about who the action was happening to or exactly what was happening. It was a very depressing book. I don't think it had any real conclusion. The fact that it's called Garden State then it ends with three of the characters in New York City and one moving back home in the south was a bit out of place. It was never explained that Lane, when he tried to jump off the roof, what exactly happened, how he fell onto the fire escape, until quite later in the book. Why Lane was depressed to begin with wasn't explained or justified for any good reason. Moody probably just felt like there had to be one suicidal character. I think the book was better in the beginning when the characters were still holding onto their youth. Moody mentions a few dazzling ideas that shock and delight readers like the story of the anatomically correct dolls. That wasn't enough because near the middle of the book the interesting stories started dwindling and characters just had to reflect back to them all the time. It wasn't consistent to the end of the book. If moody could have kept up with the rate of little sub stories within this book to the end we would have a whole new better novel. None of the characters really change besides Mrs. Smail and Lane. They are not even the main characters in the novel. Lane is a secondary character forced into the main characters perspective. In fact I think that Moody only had a few characters in this book that he didn't treat like a main character. Which made it interesting but also took from the main story in a way. Alice, the main character, if she did change it was forced upon her. Something about Moody's writing that put me off a couple of times when I read it were his grammatical mistakes. More than once I saw the word an before a word that didn't begin with a. I did like this book, don't get me wrong. I just thought that it could have been better written. I liked how Moody had these passages that talked about strange things and described places. Anytime he did this I wondered where he was going then somehow every time he lead back to one of the characters doing something. In that way his writing is different from most peoples, who would have just started talking about what the character was doing right off the bat. The part I liked best in this book were the strange sub stories about the characters. I think it's worth reading just once. I should also mention that when I first saw this book I thought that it was the book based on the movie Garden State. After reading the back and one chapter I was horribly disappointed but I decided to continue with reading it.

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Interesting first novel

Garden State bears many of the hallmarks of a typical first novel - somewhat autobigraphical, straining a little to find that elusive, distinctive voice that sets out the writer's stall as a force in literature, short in length.

These aspects can often become flaws in a novel, but they can be forces for fresh, original writing too. Garden State to me seems to contain a little of both. It is a very landscape orientated book - the shabby, tarnished industrial wastes of New Jersey provide an apt backdrop to the broken lives of the characters. Tones of voice, of listlessness, of wasting depression come out well, and if you sit tight through scenes of bungled sex and substance abuse, you discover some superb prose - like this bit: 'In the neighbourhood where Dennis and Alice walked the row houses ran in diagonals. The freight rails demarcated the endpoints of these line segments, sheered them off.'

Garden State is, in ways, a nostalgic novel too. As Moody writes in the introduction, he wrote part of it living in a converted filling station in Hoboken, surrounded by Feral dogs with fleas, reflecting on his time in a psychiatric hospital. He completed it whilst working as an editorial assistant for Simon & Schuster in New York and seemed to be getting his life back on track. Garden State is almost a paean for Moody's new life at that time, and an acknowledgement of those lost years.

This novel contains the fragmented faults and broken reeds of such experiences, but also the richness and originality of voice that can be forged in such circumstances. An interesting read for the delienation of an era the novel lays out.

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Novella is the the best in the book

If you pick up The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, be sure to at least read the novella (same name) at the end if you decide you're giving up on the book as a whole. I really liked the first story in the collection, but everything else wasn't that interesting to me. I would find my mind wandering as I was reading the other stories, and I would go back and re-read. The only time this didn't happen was with the novella, which is about different slackers, but it was still interesting. If you read the bibliography at the end and the footnotes, you'll understand where Rick Moody is coming from in the novella to some extent. Not too far from his own experiences. I actually thought reading the footnotes was more interesting than most of the short stories. The booke definitely doesn't hinder me from reading more from Moody, however. At least it's worth a try.

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