The Black Veil

by Rick Moody

Book Overview

In this astonishingly inventive book, Moody tells the story of his collapse and recovery in an inspired journey through what it means to be young and confused, older and confused, guilty, lost, and healed.

In his early 20s, a lifetime of excess left Rick Moody suddenly stranded in a depression so profound that he feared for his life. A stay in a psychiatric hospital was just the first step out of mental illness. In this astonishingly...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316739014
• ISBN13: 9780316739016
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Moody's Veil is A Delight

What Moody does with this book is simultaneously brave and daring. He combines the skilled prose and sort of literary scholarship that would interest a classic literature fan with a gritty portraiture, unsparing, of modern substance abuse addiction. What I particularly enjoyed about this book was that, contrary to most memoirs where the goal is to aggrandize the life a person lived, this book is a haunting, fascinating portrayal of the dark side of a life's events, despite fame and early wealth. Should Moody desire to stroke his own ego, he would likely have had much to say--but in my view, the dense prose, philosophically complex constructs, and haunting moments in this piece made him all the more admirable for the reader. For isn't this what most of us would like to read and feel empowered by--the unglossed struggle and triumphs of those who take life by the throat? That one's private fears and foibles are actually part of the larger continuum that *is* being human? I adored this book for its language, its elegance, its playfulness, its skill, and its invention. If you are a reader who enjoys a narrative that challenges you, this book is a lovely excursion into reading something vividly and artfully done. But, what's better, it did not presume to give me yet another public persona with a spin-performing revisionist history team embellishing on the life of someone less than interesting. In my view, Moody is interesting in all projects he undertakes. And although, in all honesty, Moody's work has always fascinated me--from his early stories to essays I've read through the years--I was interested he would be so bold as to do a memoir, so picked it up and read it before other fiction on my to-read list, and thoroughly enjoyed his Black Veil. It moved me. It made me think and question. It was worth my time and I read it in one day. A piece like this gives one the feeling of viewing something mysterious and hard to capture, something seeming both hard as a plate of steel and simultaneously ephemeral and fragile as a butterfly's wing. The Black Veil is truly a fascination piece that wraps and binds a man's search for his ancestors neatly with (both literature as a departure point and) his own search for self-definition that is unflinching in many regards. In general, I hate memoirs. I loved this. For the thinking people who enjoy fine language and whimsical flight for the intellect, I do highly recommend. [close]

Very worthwhile and important

Having read this book several times cover to cover since it came out in 2001, I have grown to appreciate it more with each read. I think the main mistake previous reviewers have made in assessing the Black Veil is blaming this book (which I find is mistakenly categorized as a memoir to appease our label-loving publishing industry) for its inability to live up to their expectations of an average, straight-forward autobiography. It seems to me that Moody, as an esteemed experimental writer, had no such designs for this kind of total recall and those who foist their preconceptions of the memoir upon this book will indeed be disappointed. For the open-minded reader however, Moody has a much more interesting offering. Using himself as a means of reflecting upon the vast scales of life experience, Moody connects discussions of family and friends, alcoholism and drug use, literature and music, to grand themes such shame, criminality, and tragedy in both personal and national identities. Using Hawthorne's story, The Minister's Black Veil as a touchstone, (think Proust's madeleine but more integral) Moody achieves the rare feat of making his particular life story feel universally important.

amazements on every page

This is the memoir to read. This is the memoir to be surpassed.

Another Masterwork from the Master

A century from now, this book will be on all the reading lists, and the kids who have to read it will probably groan, but they'll all be wrong. This is not a book for kids, though. This is a book for the true adult. It delves deep, and requires courage of the reader--just as it required astonishing courage of the writer.

stunning, incandescent masterpiece

This will endure as one of the great American meditative memoirs. A harrowing work of genius.