All in all, I gotta say I'm disappointed. That's why I'm giving this book such a mediocre review- something I rarely do for books. I *loved* this movie. I love how it dealt with these "slice of life" moments in the lives of these four family members, and how they coalesced around their indescretions with a neighbor family. Paul, the son who was least involved in this inter-familial deceit (he lived at boarding school and spent the majority of the book at a friend's apartment far away in New York...

A solid 4.0 stars, but a real personal favorite of mine, so I bestow a 4.5. I read this book after developing a feverous obsession with Ang Lee's 1997 film adaptation, and was engulfed by this novel as quickly and completely as the film. Moody's prose is readable, personal, humorous and unrelenting, propelling you deeper and deeper in the lives and minds of two suburban families in 1973. The novel aches almost from the get go, eventually crescendoing into a poised but agonizing wail of pain. Tho...

The American literati bristled last year when one of the Nobel Prize bigwigs said the country’s writers were too entangled with their own mass culture to get close to a new Nobel in Literature. I don’t think that’s entirely true, but after reading "The Ice Storm" I have to say I suspect the Swedish bigwig was reading Rick Moody. Not that I didn’t like the book. But having been alive and fully conscious in the 1970’s, I knew the dozens of TV shows and pop songs Moody referenced. To be honest, the...

Let's play Literary Key Party!Here's how it goes: everyone plays an author, and then you pick another author's keys and you have to write your story in their style! For example, if I'm John Fowles and I end up with Jane Austen's keys, I might sayIt is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a young lady to lock in his basement.Here are some names to get you started:Ladies*Jane AustenFlannery O'ConnorDorothy ParkerAyn RandCarolyn Kee...

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/th...Marvel Comics never interested me. Nor did the funny pages of the newspaper. But Rick Moody obviously likes comic books and superheroes and uses them to populate an otherwise engaging book about self-realization, sexual experimentation, coming of age, and marital infidelity. Not to mention a host of other notable topics in music, film, and politics from the year 1974. ...Until recently he had believed that the elderly were born that way, unlucky. Now he kn...

Maybe this book is too long. Maybe the other reviewers are correct that Rick Moody's scrupulous attention to 70s pop culture overwhelms his ability to tell a good story. Maybe I know, and like, Ang Lee's movie adaptation too well. Whatever the case, my mind wandered an awful lot while I was trying to read The Ice Storm, a book I first admired but didn't like and then didn't admire or like all that much.Three of my wandering thoughts:1. The Ice Storm tells the story of a typical day in the life o...

It tries hard to be clever but the language carries a heavy & pompous aroma. Instead of it being cold, sad and brilliant, it is too insider-y, too ordinary a tale and almost overly faulty. It was written... why? That countless times the author tries to tie in the family drama with the strangeness of the times (1973), & fails, pretty much destroys its entire purpose, whatever that may have been and was not.Yes, there is a tragedy (and when it comes to these dramadies, when doesn't that happen?) i...

Reading Road Trip 2020Current location: ConnecticutNo one believes in the weather anymore.As I entered the state of Connecticut, the weather report was bad. The entire region was about to experience a thirty year storm, a deadly combination of sleet then snow then freezing temperatures that would top off the roads like popsicles. Residents and drivers were cautioned to stay home, so I promptly pulled into the nearest hotel to hunker down with my blanket and my book.Unfortunately, the residents o...

3.5 stars.The Ice Storm was, oftentimes, an incredibly difficult read. Not in terms of structure or writing-style--Moody's writing was often sharp-intake-of-breath-beautiful: "The sheer, white drapes in the guest room were limp as the bangs of a sad schoolgirl" (5) or "Once his dreams had been songs. He'd been a balladeer of promise and opportunity" (6)but in the affect it had on me, the reader. Many of the scenes in the book were discomfiting, disturbing, heavily focused on sex acts, and the wo...

I saw the Ang Lee adaptation of this book a few years back and so was curious about Moody's novel. While the movie was stylized and Twin Peak-ish, it was a tad boring. The novel, on the other hand, was a page turner.Set during a single 24-hour period in New Canaan Connecticut, 1973, Moody gives us an accurate lay of the land with all the products, projects, and preoccupations of the beginning of Watergate and the end of Viet Nam. I'm the same age as two of the teens in the book, Wendy and Sandy,...

Beautifully written. Punchy and witty. The end had a surprising twist I wasn't expecting!

I'm not sure what I think about this book. On one hand, Moody has a spellbinding quality about his writing. His voice is quite unique, and from a purely linquistic and literary perspective I found the book quite appealing. Also, I'm always attracted to writers who write about real, unattractive, unwholesome, unheroic people, and I usually enjoy works that are trying to expose the dark underbelly of society. On the other hand the story seems, I don't know, contrived maybe. I appreciate his commen...

1.5 STARS Set in the 1970s during an Ice Storm sexual awakening and secrets are plaguing the small town. I found it trying to hard to be literature. The movie was nothing to write home about.

Fucking family. Feeble and forlorn and floundering and foolish and frustrating and functional and sad, sad. Fucking family. Fiend or foe.Likely Ang Lee's film remains superior. The struggle is apparent here. One trying to rationalize one's upbringing is always a fool's errand. Moody appears to halt before the warmth. He's perhaps too keen to be clinical.

An exuberant and dark novel that makes you both laugh and hold your stomach at the detailed and nauseating portrayals of the shame of youth and family. No one is safe in this book, and no one is good. Everything is tinged with either a rot that is unredeemable or a rot that is still in its seedling state. The children will be as rotten as the parents, and the parents seem beyond hope. The culture of the town is hopeless and the only thing that makes it at all uplifting is the sense that this era...

On the outset, Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm appears to be a Generation X era relic about what it was like to grow up in the 1970’s. Any serious reader has probably read at least one of these type of stories before; stories chock full of ironic kitsch and facile observations on how screwed up the Me generation were. At the beginning of the novel, Moody lives up to that description, as he sloshes the kitsch with a ladle, with lists of brand names, pop songs, and other period icons so that you can be...

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fi1v...The Ice Storm is a tirade on how terrible your life can be when you are WASP and rich and priviledged. It's well written and flows like a wonder, but it is one of those books in which nothing really happens even when people die and everyone is a complete asshole, and if you are looking for one of those, by all means read Franzen's 21st century novels - they are, at least, quite dope - or John Updike's Rabbit novels before turning to this one....

This was a favorite when I first read it at around age 20. I responded to its cynical view of American suburban life and this dissolution of the nuclear family. I admired its wry take on consumerism and the soulless pop culture of its era, the early 1970s, and its rhetoric influenced a wannabe subversive undergrad pretentiousness that I didn't shake until well into adulthood. In a similar way, its unorthodox stylistic features and narrative structure informed my own half-assed attempts at being

What I love about this book is its unsentimental view of suburban turmoil and discontent--that phrase "all is not what it seems" I love to see played out in literature so much. In some ways, THE ICE STORM feels like it picks up where Richard Yates' classic and brilliant suburban novel REVOLUTIONARY ROAD left off--from the 50's to the early 70's--and in the span of that decade between the two books, adults haven't learned much. One immediate difference with Moody's story though, is that he offers...

I don't recall actually reading this but I know that I watched the movie and that I used to live with a copy of this book back when I was actually reading books like all teh time so I'm pretty sure I read it but cannot recall anything, in part because if I actually did read this book, I did not realize that I had seen the film adaptation until much much later, it being one of those sorts of movies one watched in secret