Overview

Nixon and 'Nam, pet rocks and shag rugs, wife-swapping and party-hopping. Suburban New England, 1973, and the Hood family are about to wish they'd stayed home. Astutely acerbic, painfully funny, THE ICE STORM is an astonishing novel of the decade that taste forgot. 1973 - 'The last year of the sixties' as the author describes it. Amidst the worst storm for 30 years the local families gather for a party - the highlight of which is the wife-swapping 'key game' - and for two couples this supposedly harmless piece of liberal-minded entertainment spells permanent disaster. Rick Moody's first novel is a dark satire on the 1970s, the gadgets, the music, the politics and most of all the people.

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9780349110301

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Reviews

'THE ICE STORM is one of the wittiest books about family life ever written' THE GUARDIAN 'A huge '70s nostalgia trip, a litany of kitsch, a mountain of memorabilia as the backdrop to a bitter-sweet story of suburban America.' TIME OUT 'A brave, remarkable and beautiful book' Jeffrey Eugenides

In 1973, a decaying suburban Connecticut family has a bad day. Father Benjamin Hood is a middle-aged alcoholic, tormented by canker sores, in danger of losing his job as a media and entertainment expert for a high-end brokerage house, and having an affair with a neighbor named Janey. His wife, Elena, is cold and distant, even though she gets a kick reading about impotence in Masters and Johnson and believes herself capable of abandon. Fourteen-year-old Wendy Hood's raging hormones and desire to break out lead to dry humping in basements and graveyards and a daring public display with a girlfriend at a slumber party. Older brother Paul, relegated to boarding school, gets stoned and compulsively follows the comic book capers of the Fantastic Four. On this fateful day, Janey disappears in the middle of her afternoon rendezvous with Benjamin to do some shopping; Benjamin catches Wendy and Janey's son Mike going at it; Elena confronts Benjamin about his infidelity; Benjamin and Elena find themselves at a neighborhood key party (a '60s tradition that migrated belatedly to suburbia whereby men toss their keys in a bowl at the beginning of the night and at the end of the night the women randomly select a set and go off with its owner); Janey purposely shies away from the Hood key ring; Benjamin passes out on the bathroom floor; Elena goes off with Janey's husband; Wendy wanders over to Mike's house and seduces his younger brother Sandy because Mike isn't around; Paul makes an unsuccessful play for the woman of his dreams with alcohol and drugs; and matters only get worse because a vicious northeaster rages outside. Moody (Garden State, 1992) masterfully captures suburban angst through lucid detail. But his characters lack substance so that we don't care what happens to them, and in the end, it seems, neither do they. Too cold. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Rick Moody was born in New York City and attended Brown and Columbia Universities. His first novel, GARDEN STATE, was published in 1992. He has also published short fiction and essays in many US journals such as STORM and THE PARIS REVIEW.

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