The night after Thanksgiving, Elena Hood takes the turkey carcass out of the refrigerator and carves what is left of it onto three plates, with a block of frozen peas melting in its own synthetic butter. The meat is dry. She knows it is dry, and the knowledge feels to her like a moral failure. Her husband, Ben, drinks scotch beside his glass of milk, her daughter hunts through the fridge for something better, and for twenty minutes nobody says a word. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody gets to its key party, its adulteries and its freezing rain soon enough, but this supper is the place to start, because it explains everything that follows: a family that has run out of things to say to each other on the one weekend of the year when it is supposed to sit down together.
Silence Is Elena’s Native Language
Elena is the book’s quiet triumph. She reads constantly, working her way through the occult shelf and the self-help aisle, and she is reading about impotence in middle-aged marriages when the novel finds her. She has known about her husband’s affair for some time without anyone telling her. And she simply understood it, at a party, the way one understands weather.
Her silence has a history, and the novel gives it the room it needs. She grew up in a Boston suburb with a father who sneered at his alcoholic wife in front of guests, a brother who taught her lessons with a steak knife, and holiday dinners that played out like a ceasefire waiting to break, with the worst of it arriving when her mother finally came downstairs. Silence, for Elena, is not coldness. It is the only form of tenderness that never got punished. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody is at its best in these sections, which are angry and sorrowful at once, and which make a woman who barely speaks into the most articulate presence in the book.
The Children Notice Everything
The adults are busy failing, so the children run the town. Wendy Hood, fourteen, watches Watergate hearings the way other girls watch soap operas, enjoys seeing the president sweat, and conducts her own experiments in power in the basement of the house up the road, where the neighbours keep crates of Bazooka gum from one of the father’s business schemes. Mikey Williams, the older of the two boys next door, is a joker in a rubber Nixon mask, sweetly and hopelessly devoted to her. Their scenes together are funny, sad and unsettling, which is clearly the intention.
One of the loveliest passages belongs to Wendy alone. Her parents gone to the party, she sits under a blanket in the cold old house by the river, flicking between a late-night horror show and a television film about a woman buried alive by kidnappers. The wind gets up. She imagines the Victorian clergyman who once owned the house drifting through the rooms in a bedsheet. Spooked by her own imagination, she pulls on her poncho and walks back up the hill through the sleet, the only person on the road, feeling as though the whole storm has been arranged around her. In a few pages, the novel catches exactly how loneliness and boredom shade into risk when a fourteen-year-old has a house to herself and nobody checking in.
But here the novel asks a great deal of its reader. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody describes the sexual lives of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds at length and in detail, and it does so from a vantage that frequently shares their excitement rather than standing back from it. The argument is plain enough: these children are what a decade of parental permissiveness produced. The prose does not always keep its distance from what it depicts, and many readers will find that harder to forgive than any of the adults’ sins.
Paul, the Hoods’ son, spends the night away from all of this. He takes the train into Manhattan to see a girl from his boarding school, finds a rival already installed on her sofa, and raids her parents’ medicine cabinet, where the friend opens beer bottles with his molars and the sleeping pills get handed round like sweets. Later, his train home sits dead on the line in the dark, and a heavy-set stranger who seems to know his father sends him fleeing down the carriages in a haze of guilt and paranoia. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody gives Paul the loneliest night of anyone, and the most self-loathing; his chapters are where the comedy runs thinnest.
Before the Ice Storm, a Party
The middle of the book is a cocktail party, and Moody fills it with the jargon of the moment. Guests trade the language of est and encounter groups, an economist’s free-market slogans circulate like a cold, and a local bore delivers seventeenth-century parish history to anyone he can corner. It is sharp and often very funny.
It is also, at times, contemptuous. The new rector, the town historian and Janey Williams, Ben’s mistress, are seen almost entirely from the outside and mostly for laughs, and Janey in particular is denied the interior life the novel gives Elena. The men’s self-pity, too, runs in loops: Ben’s loneliness is restated so often that it begins to feel like a refrain rather than a revelation. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody has a comic gift that occasionally forgets to be generous.
Where The Ice Storm Came From
Rick Moody, born in New York in 1961, grew up in Darien and New Canaan, the Connecticut towns this book anatomises, and was sent away to St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire before Brown and a writing degree at Columbia. Soon after finishing that degree he checked himself into hospital for alcoholism. His memoir of that period and of his family’s buried history, The Black Veil, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and his novel Purple America, another single weekend in suburban Connecticut, followed this one in 1997.
The Ice Storm by Rick Moody sold respectably on publication in 1994, but the film three years later sent readers back to it. The cast was remarkable: Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Christina Ricci, Tobey Maguire, Elijah Wood, and Sigourney Weaver, whose performance as the neighbour won her a BAFTA. The director prepared his actors by giving them piles of early-seventies magazine cuttings to study, and it shows in every lapel.
Readers should know the novel contains drug use, infidelity, sexual material involving young teenagers, assault, self-harm and a violent death.
Final Thoughts
The ice arrives in earnest only in the last third, and when it does, the book changes temperature. The jokes thin out, the separate nights begin to touch, and the final pages are written with a restraint that the busy, crowded middle never quite manages. Nobody makes a speech. A family stands in the cold, doing small practical things because the large ones are beyond them. The Ice Storm by Rick Moody is a better ending than it is a journey, but the ending is worth every detour it takes to get there.
For a holiday-table novel with more warmth, So Far Gone by Jess Walter turns on an argument over Thanksgiving dinner and finds its way back to forgiveness. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett offers a family gathered at home, telling the truth slowly, in the gentlest possible register. And John Cheever’s stories of the commuter suburbs are the place where Moody’s Connecticut began.
Supper is over before the book even starts. What is left is the washing up.