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“... suffers, then the reader, and finally the publisher, all together in a tiny whirlpool of pain.’ Rick Moody’s The Black Veil is the latest voyage to the bottom of the sink, a journey of self-discovery jinxed by dense fog and treacherous syntax. Moody is best known for his novels, Garden State (which is being ...”

“... When he published The Ice Storm in 1994, Rick Moody seemed to be looking for a workable compromise between suburban realism and what Gore Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on ...”

“... Like much of Rick Moody’s previous work, Purple America charts the lives of the ‘slovenly, affluent’ young. It’s not an especially good life. Moody’s characters are distinctly unhappy, unformed, unable to proceed with their lives in anything like a reasonable way ...”

“... by failing to recognise – and took residences at Sheffield, UEA, Brown, UT Austin, Adelaide. Rick Moody remembered his first encounter with Carter at a creative writing seminar: ‘Some young guy in the back … raised his hand and, with a sort of withering scepticism, asked, “Well, what’s your work like?” … There were a lot of ums and ahs ...”

“... Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed ...”

“... and Bullet Park. They are the staples for John Updike in tennis-and-adultery mode: as they are for Rick Moody in The Ice Storm, and even, in a modified form, for Don DeLillo in White Noise. But it was Richard Yates who followed the nightmare of Remsen Park to its logical conclusion: Revolutionary Road is the tragedy of Organisation Man. In Yates’s ...”

“... as another writer is an act of the imagination, and perhaps easier for the better writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,’ does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of ...”

“... from the group; his ‘daily shame’ when he walks by the office of the man who took his place, Rick Ambrose, or takes a ‘craven detour’ to avoid him, connects him ‘to the sufferings of Christ’. Without Russ, the group has exploded in popularity, and – in a ‘brutal betrayal’ – has recently come to include his son Perry, as well as his only ...”

“... to being called ‘Bogie’ by people he’d never meet. But he’d only just made it. He was a moody man, a depressive and a needler and often a mean drunk. There was a bitterness at his core: he resented being born on Christmas Day and missing the bounty of a birthday; he reckoned his well-to-do parents didn’t love him enough; he’d had three marriages ...”

“... endless as an American freight train and designed to strike the reader with comparable force, of Rick Moody’s 1997 novel Purple America. Moody, protected by his structural choices, can take the risk of pushing the tone to extremes of banality and grandeur. His whole book takes place on a single day, and so can ...”