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The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions
Rick Moody

Little, Brown, 2002 - 323 pages

average customer review:based on 34 reviews
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Good. Period.

Now that time has passed, and the bad reviews are remembered best as, well, examples of bad reviewing, why not revisit The Black Veil, and read it on its own terms?

My guess is that you'll find, as I did, a really beautiful narrative, a work of sustained mystery, the kind of book (like the best of John Hawkes, W.G. Sebald, Marilynne Robinson) that will help the reader find a profound quiet, a meditative space, where comfort might be found in the complexities of things, and in finding a fellow traveler who whispers a familiar sad song.


interesting departure for Moody

The "digressions" part of the subtitle primarily refers to the fact that this is not only a memoir but also a sort of family genealogy, or an attempt at one. Moody finds that he may be the descendant of a Reverend Moody who was fictionalized as the title character of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil." Digging through obscure histories and travelling about New England in an attempt to find out more about the man behind Hawthorne's self-loathing minister, Moody creates a sense of very powerful parallels to his own struggles with severe depression and drugs. These sections alternate without Moody making explicit connections between the two stories, but the format keeps the pages turning and the reader intrigued.


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italicized portrait of artist as young man

First off, I'm not a huge fan of Moody's italics. He writes so well that they seem unnecessary; they're the equivalent often of someone jabbing you with a pencil as you're trying to study. This memoir is almost interchangeable from all the others by young writers who tell their story of grappling with broken homes, mood disorders, breakdowns, etc. However, there is almost no emphasis on the author's career, instead we get page after page of quotes of a distant relative, Hankerchief Moody, whose odd life interests the author (although there is never any guarantee from the beginning that they are actually related). While this may sound like a way to keep the book from getting bogged down in too much "I" time, it doesn't really work. When the author stops quoting his relative, he digresses into ruminations about various subjects such as school shootings and William Burroughs.

To be fair, the reader is warned in the beginning about how the writer will digress. You can't say you haven't been warned. But by the time a writer pens a memoir, hopefully he or she is old enough to have pulled many of the threads together. Cliched though it is, Moody does not seem to have "come to terms" or had much closure on the rocky period he describes here. That would have helped. Or maybe just a skilled editor.


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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7



In his early 20s, a lifetime of excess left Rick Moody suddenly stranded in a depression so profound that he feared for his life. A stay in a psychiatric hospital was just the first step out of mental illness. In this astonishingly inventive book, Moody tells the story of his collapse and recovery in an inspired journey through what it means to be young and confused, older and confused, guilty, lost, and healed. Woven through his own story, Moody also traces his familys paternal line, looking for clues to his own melancholyin particular to one ancestor, Reverend Joseph Moody, about whom Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an archetypal story of shame called The Ministers Black Veil. In a brilliant display that is no less than a literary tour de force, Moody ties past and present, family legend, and serious scholarship into a book that will draw comparisons not just to recent memoirs by Dave Eggers and Martin Amis but to forebears like Nabokovs Speak, Memory.


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