Review of Contemporary Fiction, October 1st, 2002
Rick Moody. The Black Veil. Little, Brown, 2002. 323 pp. $24.95. In this new book, not quite a memoir, not really a novel, Rick Moody uses the coincidence of a possible ancestor having been the model for the face-- concealing Mr. Hooper in Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" as a hook on which to hang an exploration of American loneliness, shame, and violence. Moody easily interweaves autobiography, in which he relates his own depression, addiction, and recovery; family history, of both his immediate paternal forebears and more ancient Moodys-especially Joseph "Handkerchief" Moody, who, l...
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