Rick Moody
Hiram Frederick Moody III (born October 18, 1961) is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought him widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into the film The Ice Storm. Many of his works have been praised by fellow writers and critics alike.
For the women's basketball coach, see Rick Moody (coach).
Rick Moody
Hiram Frederick Moody III
October 18, 1961
New York City, U.S.
- Novelist
- short story writer
- essayist
- composer
- professor
1992–present
Early life and education[edit]
Moody was born in New York City to banker and investment strategist[1] Hiram Frederick Moody, Jr., and Margaret Maureen, daughter of Francis Marion Flynn, president and publisher of The New York News. The Moody family were resident in Maine for generations from around 1680; Moody's father was born there, but his parents subsequently lived at Winchester, Massachusetts.[2][3][4] Moody grew up in several Connecticut suburbs, including Darien and New Canaan, where he later set stories and novels. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and Brown University.
He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1986; nearly two decades later he would criticize the program in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly.[5] Soon after finishing his thesis, he checked himself into a mental hospital for alcoholism.[6]
Career[edit]
Once sober and while working for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he wrote his first novel, 1992's Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey, where he was living at the time. In his introduction to the 1997 reprint of the novel, he called it the most "naked" thing he has written.[7]
Moody's second novel, 1994's The Ice Storm, was his critically praised breakthrough. Adam Begley, writing for the Chicago Tribune, called it "A bitter and loving and damning tribute to the American family... This is a good book, packed with keen observation and sympathy for human failure".[8] His third novel, 1997's Purple America also received praise. Occurring over a single weekend, the story of Hex Radcliffe's visit to suburban Connecticut was described by the New York Times as "breathtaking...The novel is wonderfully convincing about the contrary, almost arbitrary shifts that seem to lie at the heart of human feeling."[9]
2001's Demonology, a short story collection, received particular attention for its title story, of which Nicci Gerrard wrote: "It is about the death of a sister, whose life he offers to us in snapshots: her childhood, her motherhood, her sudden death. 'I should have a better ending,' he says. 'I shouldn't say her life was short and often sad, I shouldn't say she had her demons, as I do too...' It is tempting to think of this beautiful and melancholy coda to Rick Moody's stories as the appearance of the author, stepping out of the shadows at last, particularly since the first story in the collection is also, though much more obliquely, about the death of a beloved sister."[10]
Moody's memoir The Black Veil (2002) won the NAMI/Ken Book Award and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. The Diviners was released in 2005. Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of The Diviners, changed the cover after the galleys came out because women reacted negatively to it. The original cover showed a Conan the Barbarian-type image in technicolor orange; the new cover uses that same image, but frames it as a scene on a movie screen.[11] The Diviners was followed in 2007 by Right Livelihoods, a collection of three novellas published in Britain and Ireland as The Omega Force. The Four Fingers of Death was released July 28, 2010 by Little, Brown and Company. In 2012, he won Italy's Fernanda Pivano Award. 2015's Hotels of North America, his most recent novel, was named a best book of the year by NPR and the Washington Post.[12]
His second memoir, The Long Accomplishment was published in 2019.[13]
In addition to his fiction, Moody is a musician and composer. He belongs to a group called the Wingdale Community Singers, which he describes as performing "woebegone and slightly modernist folk music, of the very antique variety."[14] Moody composed the song "Free What's-his-name," performed by Fly Ashtray on their 1997 EP Flummoxed,[15] collaborated with One Ring Zero on the EP Rick Moody and One Ring Zero in 2004, and also contributed lyrics to One Ring Zero's albums As Smart As We Are, Memorandum, and Planets.[16]
In 2006, an essay by Moody was included in Sufjan Stevens's box-set Songs for Christmas.
In 2013, he published the first interview with David Bowie after the release of The Next Day.[17] In 2016, he co-wrote three songs with Tanya Donnely on her new Swan Song Series album.[18]
in 2007, when asked by the New York Times Book Review what he thought was the best book of American fiction from 1975 to 2000, Moody chose Grace Paley's The Collected Stories.[19]
In 2001, Rick Moody co-founded the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award with Ethan Hawke, Hannah McFarland, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh.[20]
Moody is a co-host, along with One Ring Zero's Michael Hearst, for the 18:59 Podcast series.[21]
Personal life[edit]
He lives in Brooklyn and Dutchess County, and he is married to the visual artist Laurel Nakadate.
Awards[edit]
Garden State won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award. Moody has since received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Conjunctions, Harper's, Details, The New York Times, and Grand Street.
Criticism[edit]
Novelist and critic Dale Peck unfavorably reviewed Moody's The Black Veil in The New Republic, a review so harsh it has become infamous in literary circles.[33] Peck began the review with the sentence "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation,"[34] arguing that Moody's writing is "pretentious, muddled, derivative, [and] bathetic." Peck has since said of his lede, "When I wrote a sentence like 'Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation,' in my head, I'm imagining 50 people reading that line. I'm imagining 50 people reading it in context. The very next line, which is an apology for the opening line of the review, says that that line is meaningless."[35] Moody and Peck have since participated in a pie throwing for charity[36] and appeared together on a panel about Thomas Bernhard.[37]
In the online journal The Rumpus, Moody slammed pop-country star Taylor Swift and her music, labeling her lyrics "artificial and repellent" and equating its interest to that of Olestra-based products, Swiffers, tiered Jell-O dessert products, home cosmetic surgery, and rectal bleaching.[38] After commenters objected to Moody's anti-Swift screed, Moody took to Salon and wrote "I am happy, in the end, that a lot of young women like Taylor Swift. I am glad they have music they love, even if I believe they will be bored of her ultimately, just as I once was happy about the Bay City Rollers, or Sweet, or Alice Cooper, or, differently, Kiss, even though I recognized that music was kitsch... But it’s the job of the critic to sort through the collision of contemporary music with the history of the form and to assess music based on more enduring values, which are, it’s true, partly subjective, but which also come to rest on an understanding of what music has been".[39]