It's odd--leafing through some of the other reviews, I apparently liked/didn't like this for entirely different reasons from its other readers. I'm not nonplussed in the least by his purported inscrutable erudition, enjoyed the delicate fencing-parries he offers at Hawthorne by means of a college acquaintance with Derrida, and wasn't even that hellishly bored by the long chapters of genealogical research (if my family were half as interesting as the Moodys, I'm sure I'd do exactly the same thing...

His ambitious first memoir (in the age of memoir) and a fine one combining the quest of origins, genealogy mixed with a literary lesson, and a very personal narrative.

Wow--Rick Moody never ceases to impress me. This work is funny, heart-rending, insightful, analytical, and readable all at once. So often I found myself relating to Moody's past experiences, allowing them to conjure up similar episodes from my own past.

Moody puts quotes and references in italics, braiding together his voice and often Nathaniel Hawthorne's, a lot of genealogical and literary sources, etc. I did not miss footnotes. It might be helpful to read Hawthorne's appended "The Minister's Black Veil" before the book, which I did not do, because I did not realize it was there. Representative quotes:Moody's introduction to the book: "If birds will describe the obsession, I will break away to describe the birds I have seen; if baseball will

I often have theories that depart quit drastically from their original subject, much like my theory about Rick Moody's message in this book. Without much evidence to prove my case, I say this book describes depression as the lack of identity whereby you take on the guilt of any history that has come before you. Even where you haven't committed a crime against your own moral conscience, you might just do so at any time without being clear how, when or why it happened. So it's a darkness brought a...

I've tried. I respect his trying, too, to break out, to do it his way. Like Belle and Sebastian, like Thomas Pynchon, Rick Moody's just not for me.

Neglected Literary Classic Destined To Be Remembered Alongside "Angela's Ashes"With "The Black Veil", Rick Moody has written a brilliantly realized memoir which I suspect will one day be remembered as well as Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes". Indeed there are many passages throughout "The Black Veil" which rank alongside "Angela's Ashes" for their elegant literary quality. If some readers - and I might add, book reviewers such as the infamous Dale Peck - have been frustrated with "The Black Veil...

I didn't enjoy this as much as I had hoped. It was arduous reading that I do not recommend.

This book bordered on being a complete waste of time, not because of the presence of anything, but rather because there was really nothing in it that went beyond a general recounting of Moody's life. It wasn't unreadable, but I came out of it with basically one idea.The one thing I got out of it: I liked the idea that (loose paraphrase coming) entire lives have been left unexplored simply out of the fear of hearing our father's angry voice.

While hunting for structure in memoir, I spied on "The Rumpus" and found a reference to this book. It's framed within Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Black Veil" which is interesting, but I'm not convinced it works. It's literal thread is formal and lofty when it could be captivating and urgent. The digressions are pretty great at times-beautiful phrasing-but also self indulgent and tedious. What resonates the best are the relationships in the book, which are sick, like the author. Some sentences are...

You have to give moody credit for never bowing to the demands of genre and tradition. He is unerringly in search of a truer approach to whatever he's working on. This memoir is a fantastic example of that. It is experimental and, in the end, not mind-blowingly fun to read. Still, it meanders meaningfully, drops into literary criticism, family-tree research, and over to the well-trod areas of traditional memoir. He works with a Hawthorne story as an over-the-top metaphor, and proceeds to undermin...

The first 3 and last 3 pages are good. The rest is tedious.

I'm not always a Moody partisan. I find some of his books to be pointlessly clever or even ugly at times. But this one really worked for me, and that's a hard sell for a couple reasons.First, I feel like the whole "I'm a writer not an academic and I'm going to school you critics" kind of approach to literature one where writers I otherwise respect often embarrass themselves. I might not agree with Moody's interp here, and especially what he wants to be his takedown of J Hillis Miller, but he doe...

When one needs a break from the contrived nature of novels, there's Rick Moody. Especially this one. Its semiautobiographical, and semi-narrative. You get the impression you're eavesdropping on thoughts meant to be private. It's deep, feels real, but is not so much uplifting for the experience. Partly I think it's fascinating to witness someone who can't hold his life together and partly its the satisfaction of his unique voice.The veil theme played out just fascinated me.Publisher's weekly revi...

Rick Moody has moments, these brief little flashes of great prose. However the overviews of most of his stories and novels tend to be far less appealing, to put it kindly.I literally threw this book across the room once I got to the final string of paragraphs which are merely a list of things that are black. "I oughtta punch you in the face!"-Upright Citizens BrigadeEDIT: Ok, this book wasn't so terrible. The way it ended though just drives me up the wall. He goes from describing his sister's tr...

A memoir like no other. Alternating chapters detail his life story, and chart a road trip he and his father took through the old stomping grounds of author Nathaniel Hawthorne, an ancestor of Moody's. The Hawthorne chapters in all honesty are probably something you'd only want to read once, but the confession chapters I return to again and again - his battles with insanity, drinking, drug abuse, and old girlfriends as well as the ongoing struggle to commit his impulses to paper make this a fasci...

I very much enjoyed this book and found the dialog very thought provoking. It is exactly as advertised, "a memoir with digressions," that made following the story line much like a maze. I was surprised at how low other's rated this book but it had many of the elements of a story that I liked: focus on family, genealogy and history; the author's ability to share his experience of drug/alcohol abuse and mental illness; another example of the difficult transition from child to adult that makes me f...

A brave and intelligent read, although he sometimes lapses into a list of a sentence that wanders into suffocating pretension (listing black at the end, for instance). There are times where you have to slap your brain and make it focus so you understand what he said...and times where the slap isn't worth it because he's middling--as I say, just at times-- and a bit lost. But, that's the point of the book... I hadn't heard of this Hawthorne story --The The Black Veil--due to my genetics-based sco...

The memoir wasn't much, but the digressions were first rate.

There were some amazing parts in this book, but they were interspersed with some historical ramblings about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Moody's family history which I found really dull, and after a while stopped reading altogther, just paging through until I got to the next part.The sections about Moody's breakdown were facinating and the language was so alive. This is the first Rick Moody I have read and I definitely want to read more.