Customer Reviews

Garden State

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I have only recently discovered Rick Moody & in a short period have read almost all of his books - this is my favourite. The stories here are reasonably varied in content, & he has a lot of fun taking liberties with form & style & content (what a story should be). These are not necessarily just straight narratives, but play around with ideas of meaningful coincedence & circles of happenings. It's always good to see a writer unafraid of taking risks in order to get at some sort of truth - it's what great artistry is all about (I think anyway). I too, along with the other person who has written a review, like the stories 'Phrase Book' (the girl who took a massive hit of acid) and 'The Apocalypse of Bob Paisner' (a term paper in which a guy flunking out of school relates his life to the Bible). One thing about Moody, apart from everything else, is that his characters here are always wholly believeable. Even if the situations are sometimes extreme, the characters ring true - they are created with a great deal of empathy, & if the reaction to them isn't always empathetic, at least it's with understanding. This, to me, is the most important feature. The last story in the book is quite self-revelatory. It's a neat idea - Moody uses a selection of books from his bookshelf as a 'Bibliography' & footnotes occasional ones in order to explain certain parts of his life. I think it takes a person a lot of courage to expose themselves implicitly like this (but it sure beats a publishers blurb on the back cover). Rick Moody is a very good writer & you don't get too much better in contemporary writing than Ring of the Brightest Angels Around Heaven.

Although I dressed really strange in college and high school (I wore the "big black boots" before it was popular for EVERYONE to wear them), and hung out with people who were in bands and wanted to be DJ's, it was kind of hard to believe that everyone in this group of friends had a drug problem. Perhaps that's because I'm a product of the 80's and just never got into drugs. However, I found the descriptions of how the characters in the book felt about their current situations riveting. I was always curious to know why people did it, and I guess "Garden State" answered some of my questions. Mr. Moody's descriptions of New Jersey were like I've always pictured it, gray and industrial, with nothing much going on but trains, cars and malls. It was also amazing that this was somebody's first novel, written by someone who was so young. The chapters seemed to have been written by somebody who is much more older and has lived through a lot more than th! e average college student. Perhaps life experiences have brought this into the novel. More enjoyable to me than the novel, however, was Mr. Moody's story behind it in his added preface. Everyone has their own "cuts that don't heal" (not necessarily in the literal sense), and I think it took a lot of courage on the part of the author to openly write about his life and the background of what went on when he was writing this story (which I probably related to more readily than the story itself). It actually was that preface that helped me understand the novel better. This novel should not be taken just as it is -- there is a lot more underneath the surface and it leaves the reader with a lot to think about.

I read this book by chance as a project in school. I happened to see the cover of it and got interested, a very fortunate coincidence for me. The book contains a number of stories, and every one is individual. They capture you and immerse you into a big pot of feelings and thoughts, which is extremely hard to get away from. Every story is individual because they all have something special, like one in which a man connects all the happenings in his life to the apocalypse of the Bible, or the one in which an interview is taking place with a girl who took 70 hits of acid in one day and survived with a wacko mind. The stories are not grand or magnificent, but small and commonplace. I instantly fell in love with this book and this author and I can strongly recommend anyone interested in more or less alternative reading to read it.

Rich Moody won a Pushcart award for this. Nominations for the award come from editors who would have liked to publish a book, but couldn't usually for commercial reasons. It's easy to see why publishing it at most commercial houses would have been difficult. Moody is a tough and challenging writer, but well worth the effort. It is not just New Jersey that he captures, but a very real group of young people and a very real time in America. I recommend all of his books, but have a special feeling for Garden State.

Rich Moody won a Pushcart award for this. Nominations for the award come from editors who would have liked to publish a book, but couldn't usually for commercial reasons. It's easy to see why publishing it at most commercial houses would have been difficult. Moody is a tough and challenging writer, but well worth the effort. It is not just New Jersey that he captures, but a very real group of young people and a very real time in America. I recommend all of his books, but have a special feeling for Garden State.

The author writes well, indeed, but of a generation that may not be the reader's. At that point, the book becomes uninteresting. It seems that it took the characters in this book until 1990 to catch up with the 1960's. I don't believe that this book should have been re-issued; it is (out)dated.

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.

Written in a more traditional style than the Ice Storm, but with a slightly stronger storyline, and a little less uncomfortable in his depictions of his characters. The main character has just come back home from being in an instituation and is trying to get back into a normal step, while trying to straighten his life out. Unfortunately friends help him to not do so. Well written and smart, but also quite bleak. The Ice Storm was a natural progression for Moody and Purple America continues to build on the start of Moody's career. Read each of his novels and his short story collection.

One of the best things about 'discovering' a wonderful writer is reading everything else they've published, not just the one you liked first. Garden State is Moody's first novel. It's a messy story about a (thank God) vanished time. It was really interesting to read, because his subsequent writing just gets better and better. It's bound by a plot at once complicated and sublimely simple. The several main characters, basically nice-people male and female twentysomethings in the 'eighties, can't quite 'leave home,' are are often stoned, drunk, or otherwise debilitated. They sleep late, smoke, party, drive around, play music, fret about their moms, (there's a freakish car accident), experience despair, visit the sick, poke through piles of laundry in search of leggings, hang out, wear black nail polish, have desultory sex, and reflect rather thoughtfully on things while spending a month (one of them does this) or so in a pretty nice mental hospital.There is wonderful yearning for meaning and love -- also oblivion and ecstasy. The whole thing takes place in NJ, which is also used as a symbol of -- something or other. Great sense of place, and a hip sort of warmth and compassion is in there, too. This novel is strange, a little bit difficult to love, but worth the trouble.

Upon picking up Rick Moody's Garden State,one might think it to be representative of the current trend of hip fiction: rife with drugs, sex, profane dialogue,and stark prose. As it happens it has all of these but the last; Moody's writing is dense and wordy, more so than the subject matter seems to merit. At times I had to read passages two or three times to understand what was going on- sticky metaphors are used in places where a more straightforward narrative might have been more elegant.

Moody spins a trendily downbeat tale, with angstful and interchangeable twenty-somethings desperately spinning through prettily rendered New Jersey wastelands, going nowhere in particular. Characters drift in and out of the different plots- among them the saga of a floundering rock band and the homecoming of an unbalanced prodigal son- which always seem about to converge but never quite do. Three-quarters of the way through the book I was unsure where the book was going, and by the end I didn't care. Vivid imagery can only go so far: Rick Moody can write, but in Garden State he has written something I didn't care to read