The Ice Storm: A Novel [Paperback]

Rick Moody (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 2002 | Series: Back Bay Books (Series)

The year is 1973. As a freak winter storm bears down on an exclusive, affluent suburb in Connecticut, cark skid out of control, men and women swap partners, and their children experiment with sex, drugs, and even suicide. Here two families, the Hoods and the Williamses, com face-to-face with the seething emotions behind the well-clipped lawns of their lives-in a novel widely hailed as a funny, acerbic, and moving hymn to a dazed and confused era of American life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Exhaustive detailing of early 1970s popular/consumer culture in suburban New England provides the context for this archetypal tale of the American nuclear family in decline. The affluent WASP community of New Canaan, Conn., is home to the Hood and Williams families, neighboring two-parent, two-child households built around increasingly dysfunctional marriages. Benjamin Hood, plagued by a loss of importance at work and a growing drinking problem, pursues an ill-fated affair with Janey Williams; his wife, Elena, feels herself losing what little regard she has left for him. Meanwhile, the adolescent children of both families experiment with sex, alcohol and drugs to find identities and to overcome a ponderous sense of alienation. A neighborhood "key party," at which couples exchange mates by drawing keys out of a bowl, brings the action to a chaotic climax as an apocalyptic winter storm culminates in physical tragedy to match the emotional damage in the small community. Pop-cultural references of the time, from Hush Puppies to the film Billy Jack , pervade the text. Unfortunately, Moody, winner of the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award for his first novel, Garden State , tends to use these details in a more encyclopedic than evocative manner. His depiction of these families, however, is insightful and convincing, penetrating the thoughts and fears of each individual. And the central tragedy of his tale remains resonant, though his decrying of our cultural wasteland seems a bit stale.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Moody's first novel, Garden State, won the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award in 1991. Now he takes readers back to a very Updikean version of the 1970s: upper-middle-class discontents expressed through fumbling adventures on the sexual frontier. Benjamin Hood and his wife, Elena, barely communicate, but their neighbors, the Williams, provide diversions for them, both in fantasy and reality. Simultaneously, the couples' children, young adults all, meet and play sexual games of their own. Moody can turn a phrase--"The past was so past it hurt"--and his description of what happens when hungover Benjamin Hood carries Mike Williams home is truly unforgettable. The theme of sexual adventure in the split-level suburbs, however, has lost a bit of its freshness. Moody is a talented writer in search of better material. Marginally recommended. Eloise Kinney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books (April 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316706000
• ISBN-13: 978-0316706001
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #216,778 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A well-written, not-nice story September 6, 2004

By Michael K. Smith TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

In the late fall of 1973 I was a twenty-nine-year librarian in Dallas, cheering on the downfall of Richard Nixon and learning to write book reviews. As Moody says, it was a very, very different time -- so different I doubt anyone under thirty-five can even imagine it. No call waiting, no cable TV, no AIDS or HIV, no laser printers, no CDs, no Reagan Revolution. The names Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin still meant something. We knew who Rose Mary Woods was, too. But still, New Canaan, Connecticut, was a very different place from north Texas. That fall, Benjamin Hood and his wife, Elena, took the final step toward the break-up of their shaky, unhappy marriage. Wendy Hood, age fourteen, was becoming known as a slut, though she wasn't a bad kid and it wasn't entirely her fault. Her brother, Paul, wasn't having much fun as a seventeen-year-old preppie, either. It was the year the key party came to the upscale suburbs. None of the characters in this painful-to-read novel are particularly likable. You might feel sorry for them, at least some of the time, but you wouldn't particularly want to spend time with any of them, or at least I wouldn't. But Moody keeps you reading, wondering how they're going to screw themselves up next. Making an engrossing story out of unpleasant people and distasteful situations isn't easy, but he manages it.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the best modern novels March 10, 1998

By [e-mail]

Format:Paperback

The Ice Storm is one of the best books i have ever read. It works on a lot of different levels. The characters AREN'T fully developed, in the conventional sense, but that is delibrate. In fact, it's where a lot of the book's power comes from: no one i know is "fully developed" either. Is the book too cold? Look at the title. Moody writes about something clearly personal to him, but avoids becoming overly sentimental. The Ice Storm requires and rewards close reading.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A novel about a strange time in a strange place March 15, 2009

By rvrinsea

Format:Paperback

The Ice Storm: A Novel

Rick Moody's novel, The Ice Storm, offers a wonderful trip through the emotional landscape of affluent New Canaan, Connecticut circa November 1973. New Canaan was, and still is, one of the bedroom communities surrounding New York City. And like the other communities in the area, New Canaan is somewhat unique in America due to a combination of its tremendous, anonymous affluence created by the New York financial district, and an exceptionally disjointed lifestyle due to the long hours worked in the City and the daily 90 minute commutes from home to the train station via car, a train ride into the city and eventually a cab, or subway ride, into the financial district with the process reversing itself in the evening.

I did not grow up in New Canaan, but during this time period I lived relatively close by and visited frequently. I am also the same age as one of the book's protagonists. Based on my personal experience, Moody's novel does a stunningly good job of capturing this time and place. All too sadly, I remember many incidents from this period that are eerily similar to the fictional events that occur in the book. (Apparently I am not alone in appreciating the verisimilitude of the book, I was attending my prep school reunion in 2006 about 100 miles away from New Canaan, when a classmate stated out of the blue, I was from Darien, [a town near New Canaan], if you want to understand what my life was like before I left for school, read The Ice Storm.)

The book is centered upon the dissolving family nucleus of the Hood family, Benjamin & Elena Hood and their two teenage children, Paul and Wendy.... Also profiled, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, are the Hood's neighbors down the street, the Williams family, Jim & Janey, and their two sons, Sandy and Mike.

Aside from the human characters in the novel, there is another powerful, yet unspoken character in the novel, and that is the time and place of suburban Connecticut in 1973. In the establishment bastion of suburban Connecticut, where the social order is an essential part of the fabric of life, deep and profound turmoil is upsetting the status quo.

America had, for all intents and purposes, just been defeated in a war for the first time in its history, when the American forces unilaterally withdrew from Vietnam earlier in the year. Also for the first time in its history, American's were watching an American President being toppled by his own corrupt actions. The Watergate affair was a major story in the news, and Richard Nixon would resign in less than a year.

The status quo is crumbling as the anti-war movement winds down and relative tranquility returns to mid-1970's America. However, the social fabric and contract that have held the country together since the Depression in 1929 is crumbling. Single-parent families, the relevance of marriage, civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights are all entering the social consciousness. Entwined in this confusion are the late baby-boomers, now high-school age teenagers, and their parents who were born late in the Depression and during World War II, now both attempting to cope with the upheaval created by the early baby boomers who fueled the upheaval.

For the adults (Benjamin, Elena, Jim & Janey), who presumably married in their early twenties, and had predictable career paths mapped out, there is both frustration and envy with the younger anti-war adults who have both refused to follow the status quo, and who also seemed to be having a far greater degree of freedom in their lives. The adults in The Ice Storm are suffering mid-life crises, yet they have not even reached their mid-thirties. The adults engage in awkward experimentation with extramarital sex and drugs that is stunningly juvenile in both its awkwardness and the impetuousness with which their actions are under taken.

For the teenage children (Paul, Wendy, Sandy & Mike), not only must they cope with all of the usual pressures of adolescence, but an enormous set of expanded freedoms, with greatly liberated societal attitudes towards sex and drugs, and virtually no guidance or expectations as to how to manage these new freedoms. In addition, they suffer largely silently through the unexpected second adolescence of their parents. They are teenagers adrift to a far greater extent than is normally the case. They lack the societal focal point that defines both earlier and later generations, whether it be the Depression, World War II, the anti-war movement, or for later generations, the focus upon personal growth and consumption during the Reagan years and beyond. A level of ennui and detachment sets in among the teenagers, that is generally only seen after mass traumatic events such as war, which in some respects could be considered to be the theme of this work.

Literally and metaphorically, The Ice Storm is a book about missed connections: between husbands and wives, siblings, friends and ultimately generations. On a literal level, it is the last generation without an unending supply of consumer electronics to control movement and actions. In 1973, there were no cell phones, pagers, answering machines, computers, VCRs or even cordless phones, while the three networks and a smattering of independents were the sole providers of television entertainment. Seemingly time moves much more slowly and events happen far more randomly than is the case in contemporary society.

Moody, who would have been twelve at the time of the events he writes about in his novel, must have been an amazingly precocious child as his observations at every level are exceptionally astute. I have one minor criticism of the book, which is that some of the characters begin to engage in rather kinky sexuality that is more a product of the 1980's, and Mr. Moody's own generation, rather than that of the earlier generations in his book, where large doses of pre-marital and extramarital sex, in and of itself, was heady stuff in the 1970's.

In summary, if you are interested in peering into affluent American suburbia during the aftermath of the wild social upheaval of the 1960's, The Ice Storm is the next best thing to having lived it. Read more ›

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars You Were There, Rick, We Believe You. December 15, 1997

By [e-mail]

Format:Paperback

Like a drunken machine gunner, Rick Moody does hit a few targets in The Ice Storm, but there's a lot of icky Bazooka gum to be chewed before getting to the occasional wise insight. The novel's problems are few but each one is serious. First, the eager beaver desire to convince us that he remembers 1973 grates. At one point I counted 16 references in a row to pop psychology books of the day. Evoking a certain era from the past has to be more than listing brand names and pop songs; Moody shows no sign of realizing this and though he scratches and scratches at the emotional surface of a meaningless marriage in a banal time, he can't draw blood...so he lists a few more things. Second, the novel's heart is cold; empathy takes a back seat to mockery, except where the children are concerned. Not coincidentally, the novel's strengths are found in its portrayal of the kids. Sadly, what was meant to be a tour de force slips on the ice and flops.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC November 29, 1997

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

There is no other book that explains what's like growing up in the 70s better than THE ICE STORM. A very beautiful and delicate family drama. Yes, it's very cold but that's the point the author wants to emphasize. Most folks complain that the characters are not fully developed - its not a flaw at all. Its simply because the characters dont know themselves - they're confused and lost in a chilly world. Very distant also. We're not supposed to feel any warmth or comfortable.Moody wants us to feel distant with the characters - dont forget the progantist is the oldest son Paul whos totally lost and frozen. We see his family through his eyes.Reading the book is like visiting my childhood again. My parents spent too much time partying and tyring to keep up with the sexual revolution. It does have a devastating price - my father died of alcoholism last Christmas and I don't talk to my mom and sister anymore. For a very long time, my family forgot how to huddle even in the most difficult time. And th book rings very true for me and many other young folks. Moody is also a genius with words and his writing is very beautiful.