Rick Moody

Arriving on the literary scene in the early '90s with a fully formed, self-conscious style and an eager-to-impress intellect, Connecticut native Rick Moody quickly became the poster child of a particular kind of postmodern emo-fiction. His second novel, The Ice Storm, which examined the hidden lives of two American families during the moral freefall of the early '70s, became an unexpected crossover success, and when Ang Lee made a film of it, Moody's reputation for combining experimental technique with mainstream content soared. That same technique, however, was also seen as a liability to critics who thought that Moody's prose had a tendency to veer off into dense, florid patches that were frustratingly self-serving. (The title of his other suburban drama, Purple America, seemed to function as both caveat and pre-emptive critique.) A turning point came with Moody's byzantine memoir, The Black Veil. Critics pounced on it, most notably Dale Peck, and Moody's reputation suffered lasting damage. Recent work has seen Moody reinventing himself by branching off into music, or broadening the scope of his books to include social satires of Hollywood narcissism or campy science fiction set in the vast emptiness of outer space. Relentless, unrepentant, and undaunted, Moody remains an important figure in contemporary literature as well as a generous and tireless promoter of new generations of writers.