Garden State: A Novel - Softcover

Rick Moody (born Hiram Frederick Moody, III on October 18, 1961, New York City), is an American novelist and short story writer best known for The Ice Storm (1994), a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973. His first novel Garden State (1992) won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award. His memoir The Black Veil (2002) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. He has also received the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, the Paris Review, Harper's, Details, the New York Times, and Grand Street. He grew up in several of the Connecticut suburbs where he later set stories and novels, including Darien and New Canaan. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, Brown University, received a master's degree in fine art from Columbia University and has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase and Bennington College. According to The Writer's Almanac, Moody dropped out of graduate school at Columbia after a year because he spent most of his time drinking and had a hard time paying his rent or holding a job. Moody stated, "I was a clerk at [a bookstore] and I got fired after one month. They said, 'We really like you and we respect you as a writer, but this cash register thing is just not working out.'" Moody finally checked himself into a mental hospital, got sober, and then he wrote his first novel, Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of New Jersey. He lives in Brooklyn and Fishers Island.

Anomie is raised to the level of a deadly virus in this first novel (winner of Pushcart's Tenth Annual Editors' Book Award) about wasted youth in suburban New Jersey. ``All over Haledon, kids were coming apart.'' Kids like punk- rocker Alice, 23 years old, unemployed, and less motivated than ever now that her band has broken up; kids like Lane, who has tried every drug on the menu and is debating when to kill himself, now or later. They all remember their contemporary Mike Maas, who set himself on fire ``next to I-81, in a marsh'': though Mike is ``just a memory,'' he's a memory that won't go away. And most of them still live at home, though resisting their moms' influence; as for fathers, ``well, there were fathers, but there were no dads.'' The city (meaning New York) is within reach, but so what? For bass guitarist Scarlett, it was just ``so much disappointment,'' and it freaked Lane out so badly he had to call his mom to come get him. So it goes in this slice-of-life, which has no plot but, rather, a central episode in which Lane slips off the roof at an April Fools' Day party. (He survives, and even rediscovers, tentatively, his appetite for life.) Desolate lives, desolate landscape; but Moody paints with too broad a brush (and adopts too smart-alecky a tone) for his vision to have power. Also, he shortchanges his kids, presenting them as inarticulate zombies without going below the surface to plumb Alice's malevolence (she was deeply implicated in Lane's rooftop tumble and Mike Maas's self-immolation) or Lane's terror (what did happen to him in the city?); and this glib inattentiveness proves fatal. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.