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Bookclub: "The Ice Storm"
Presented by Jennifer Howard
Washington Post Book World Editor
Thursday, Aug. 30, 2001; Noon EDT
Welcome to the online meeting of The Washington Post Book Club, a monthly program presented by the editors and writers of Washington Post Book World. Book World contributing editor Jennifer Howard will be leading the discussion on this month's selection, Rick Moody's "The Ice Storm."
Submit your questions ahead of time or during the discussion.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Jennifer Howard: Hello, and welcome to our online discussion of Rick Moody's "The Ice Storm." On re-reading the novel, I was struck by the rawness of it: there's a staggering amount of groping and fumbling among the adults as well as among the adolescents.
Most of these interactions aren't couplings in the completed sense--we know, for instance, that Janey Williams and Benjamin Hood have been having an affair, but we only see the sordid end of that affair, when she abandons him on the guest bed in her house and then gives him the brushoff at the key party. The sexuality is self-referential--there are several graphic masturbation scenes, for instance. Everybody is groping--in the most explicit sense as well as the metaphorical sense--for connection.
I'm curious how you all felt about this aspect of the story. Did you find it too raw or is it justified by the thematic payoff? I wonder, too, whether Moody's not making the point that the grownups are just as confused about all this as their children are--maybe more so.
Bethesda, Md.:
In the first part of the book, Moody presents somewhat critically, almost sarcastically, a relatively comprehensive
picture of suburban life in the 1970's in
New Canaan, Connecticut. However, when he gets to the body of the story --the party--
his tone seems to change. He narrates in a
cool,detached manner.
Why do you think he chose this style and
approach? How different would the impact have been if he told the story from a more
personal and involved perspective? What have been his literary achievements since writing this book?
There is a considerable amount of descriptive detail in The Ice Storm but an equally significant amount of action. How
was the author able to achieve such a balance considering his technique of developing each important character in full detail,which included summaries of past as well as present?
Jennifer Howard: In the first section, he's setting up the background against which the Hoods' meltdown takes place. He's grounding the story, in other words. He also doesn't want to let on who the narrator really is--the voice is detached but, as we learn at the very end of the book, the person speaking is intimately involved in the story.
The cool, detached tone you mention in the book's middle sections is deceptive, I think. There's a lot of emotion at play here: Spouses are straying, everyone's mired in some private unhappiness, longing for something they can't quite get their hands on. The narrative style echoes their detachment from their own feelings, yet it's very charged in a subterranean way. Elena's reaction to the key party, for instance, is very emotional: This previously restrained woman decides to jump in and "play," even though she hates doing it and it's a disaster. And the emotions run very high at book's end, when Benjamin discovers Mike's electrocuted body and Wendy has what's essentially a breakdown. The scene where the family picks Paul up from the train station is very emotional, in a restrained-WASP way. It's more powerful, I think, that an over-the-top emotional blowout would have been.
Toronto, Canada:
While I have not read the book, I have seen the film. Are the two similar? Did the author have any say in the production of the movie?
Jennifer Howard: They're similar in that they focus on the same characters going through more or less the same series of events. The movie stretches the action out from just before Thanksgiving through the day after. It adds a dinner-party scene that's not in the book. The biggest change comes at the end: In the movie, Benjamin just drives by Mike's body and brings it to the Williamses' house, but in the book the scene takes 50 pages or so to play out. It's much richer in the book, and weirder. Benjamin takes Mike's body back to his own house, where the pipes have burst (metaphor alert!), and there's a comedy of errors with the ambulance drivers who come by to pick up the body and can't figure out why Benjamin's being so weird.
Ang Lee does a terrific job of capturing the story visually: lots of wintry Connecticut landscapes, and an almost ghostly feel. I don't know whether Moody had much input in the making of the film; he didn't write the screenplay but may have consulted on it. I don't know. The screenwriter did lift large chunks of dialogue from the novel, to the movie's advantage.
Lenexa, Kans.:
Ms. Howard,
The Ice Storm was my most enjoyed movie of 1997. Hand't read Moody till now. Really enjoyed Garden State and The Ice Storm.
Liked the "cosmic rudderlessness" of Moody's characters--makes fascinating narratives. Everyone following paths of whatever. I also liked the way he captured the ethos of the early 1970s--Watergate, period books and movies, "Dave Wottle." I thought the eroticism skillfully managed. Love Wendy.
QUESTION: What can you tell us about Moody's other books? Thanks.
Jennifer Howard: I'm very glad you enjoyed the book. I haven't read "Garden State," Moody's first novel. "The Ice Storm" is his second. For a guy who's only 40 he's been steadily productive. He has another novel, "Purple America," which is about a late-30s man who moves home to look after his mother, who's come down with a devastating neurological disease. Like "The Ice Storm," "Purple America" unfolds over the course of one night. (Though of course there are many chances for past history to intrude.)
Moody also has two story collections, "The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven," which I haven't read, and his latest, "Demonology," which came out a few months ago. Critics tend to feel that Moody's work has been uneven (whose isn't?), and that "The Ice Storm" is probably his best and most fully realized book. He's sometimes accused of over-writing and of being chilly, two charges I wouldn't make, although his style is more self-conscious than some. Notice in "The Ice Storm" how he layers philosophical observations in with immediate action.
I enjoyed much of "Demonology" and recommend it if you respond well to his style. He contributed a little essay on postmodern writers to "The Salon Guide to Contemporary Writers," which sheds some light on his influences and his tastes.
Montgomery Village, Md.:
Although a good read overall, I found Moody's Ice storm an over-kill, jaded and one-dimensional view of suburbia '73.("Nothing is the way we think. Everything is diluted and I'm not having any fun at it." Benjamin to Elena)
Life just wasn't so pathetically miserable ...then or today. Is this story - in the long run - a quasi-autobiographical depiction of Moody's dynamic... past and/or present ?
Jennifer Howard: I'm glad you remember the '70s more fondly! No question the story's bleak. I felt very pessimistic about nuclear families and modern marriage after re-reading it. I don't know enough about Moody's autobiography to tell you exactly how drawn-from-life the novel is, but I don't think his bleak attitude toward suburban life is a pose, and I know many people for whom it resonates. He's distilling something toxic about the times, at least as some people experienced them, and for those with a rosier view of life the results may be too bitter. I don't agree that he's jaded; there's a lot of deep feeling in this book, even if it's presented ironically and coolly on the surface.
Mclean, VA:
Did The Ice Storm remind you of Updike's " Rabbit" books?
Jennifer Howard: I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't read much of the Rabbit opus, so I can't give you an informed answer. Moody's most often compared to Updike, though, and especially to Cheever, whose territory (literal and figurative) he seems to have inherited and to be working fiercely. As I said earlier, though, he's fond of postmodern writing, and it shows in his work.
What do you think? Are you a Rabbit fan?
New York, Ny:
It was hard to read this book after seeing Ang Lee's wonderful movie. He stripped away the rawness, and the result was elegiac and equally sad, but better amplified. Did anyone else have this impression?
Jennifer Howard: The movie is a great, sad pleasure, but as I said earlier I find the book ultimately a richer experience. The movie takes the story to a more conventional place, for one thing, and makes Benjamin a more average and likable fellow (maybe that's a tribute to Kevin Kline's charm). He's got a monstrous quality in the novel that makes his discovery of and reaction to Mike's death more moving; it really does change him.
Did you find that Mike's death in the book felt more intimate--in the sense of letting us inside the moment--than it did on screen?
washington, d.c.:
I would agree that "The Ice Storm" is thematically centered on groping around for connection, and very cleverly constructed around that theme at that. It's a nice irony, of course, that the one completed connection in the novel -- Mike's with the downed electric line -- proves fatal. And there's no denying that the book has a powerful, even compulsive narrative drive to it.
But no, I don't think it delivers in the end. I read it with high hopes, as one who was a teenager growing up in the Fairfield County, Connecticut during the very years that Moody accurately -- indeed piercingly --recalls. It truly was a time of parental as well as adolescent experimentation, with as many family wrecks as the metaphorical car wrecks occurring during The Ice Storm. Some of the worst casualties indeed were in buttoned-down WASP families like the Hoods.
What I think The Ice Storm lacks is any consistent sympathy for the characters and the world they inhabit -- in contrast to the great works of literary fiction about modern American suburbia such as Cheever and Updike. In consequence, the penultimate paragraph of the book, in which the narrator confesses his identity as Paul and the painful legacy he has inherited, seems to come out of the blue. It's heartfelt, and affecting, but I wished that feeling had penetrated the preceding narrative.
Jennifer Howard: Very nice observation about the power line.
I was hoping that someone who'd grown up in Connecticut circa 1973 would check in. So you feel that the book gets the time/place right? It wasn't over the top?
Interesting that, like one of the previous posters, you felt the story kept at a distance from the characters. Especially with Paul and Wendy, for whom I think Moody has great sympathy, I didn't have that reaction. The penultimate scene, in which Wendy cuts her wrist and puts on Janey's soiled garter belt (the horror!), manages to turn something sordid into the most familial moment the Hoods manage to have.
As I said above, some of what comes across as distance is a narrative strategy, I think, to convey how these people are estranged from each other and themselves. The adults, especially Ben and Janey, are treated pretty harshly, and deserve to be, but we see inside Ben enough to feel the frustration that's building up at home and at work. It doesn't excuse him, of course, and it doesn't make him a nice guy. (Sigourney Weaver did a beautiful, aloof job with Janey's character in the movie, by the way.)
Alexandria, Virginia:
I fail to see how setting the story in 1973 had any significance. In fact, I thought his cataloging of what was and was not around thirty years ago was a distraction from a compelling story. Wouldn't it have been every bit as powerful (unless he was trying to get in a much-belated slam on Nixon) if it were set in the present?
Jennifer Howard: The Nixon-era breakdown of the body politic (so to speak) provides an essential element: It reflects and grounds the breakdown of the Hood family and their community. The country's going through an identity crisis just as the family is. There's been a betrayal of trust at all levels, and the future looks uncertain. Did you notice how the kids, not the adults, care about and follow the Watergate story? That's significant, too; they get the larger picture.
McLean, VA:
Yes I am a Rabbit fan. Updike leaves the reader with hope. I miss this in Moody's book although I'm only half way through it.
Jennifer Howard: Not a lot of hope in "The Ice Storm," although at the end he leaves you with the sense that Paul may be able to put the emotional wreckage of his family behind him now that he's told the story.
Lenexa, Kans.:
Thanks for nice response. I plan to do some more Moody reading.
You mentioned Ang Lee's film is fair game for the session. I'm a big fan of Tobey Maguire--made a sensitive, intelligent Paul Hood. Have you noticed how many other literary roles Maguire's had: Mr. Duke and Gonzo's terrified hitchhiker to Las Vegas, Irving's "Prince of Maine, King of New England," Chabon's Wonder Boy? I loved Ang Lee's faithfulness to the novel. Your thoughts? Thanks.
P.S. Any progress with "Athena's Tears"? Actually, from your photo you look a little more like Aphrodite.
Jennifer Howard: Tobey Maguire does seem to have cornered the market on roles taken from male American writers' books. I'm a fan too. He's terrific as Paul, and in "Wonder Boys." (He's doing "Spiderman" next, I think--and Chabon and Moody both have written about American comics to great effect.)
Given that there have to be differences between the written and filmed versions of a story, I agree that Ang Lee did a superb job of getting a complex book onto the screen and making it very watchable. It's hard to think of many other film adaptations that are so fully realized.
Thanks for asking about my novel. Unlike Moody, I'm a slow writer; I'm doing one last revision and then I hope I can send it out into the wider world. We'll see.
New York, NY:
Yes, the author really did "open up" Ben's character with the awfulness of discovering Mike's body and the ensuing tragic-comic scenes (the plumbing, the dog, the medics). But I felt the movie was more satsifying in that it telescoped the emotion of the characters. Kevin Kline's performance was amazing. And at the risk of sounding like Coffee Talk's Linda Richman, he was robbed of an Oscar nod. The comparison is all a bit unfair, because Moody did all the heavy lifting in creating these character and best of all, writing precisely about what it was like to live in New Canaan as the Nixon administration goes down.
Jennifer Howard: The movie had the luxury of letting the visuals do all the scene-setting, which does bring the characters' emotions into the foreground. Moody has to list the paraphernalia of '70s life--in Janey Williams's medicine cabinet, for instance, there's Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara, Bonne Bell Ten-O-Six lotion, Spring Breeze and the inevitable Valium, among other telling stuff. In the movie, the set designer's done all that work ahead of time, and the camera can just roll along and take it all in. I too enjoyed Kline's performance--he's usually good--but the character he's playing isn't quite the same character as in the book. Kline makes him more of a lovable fool.
Bethesda, Maryland:
What do you think of the choice of Paul as the narrator since he did not have direct experience at all with the Key Party? I believe it would have been better to have allowed the reader to speculate on the identity of the narrator.
Jennifer Howard: The revelation of Paul as narrator makes for a nice surprise ending. True, he doesn't have direct knowledge of much of what he's describing. That would be a much bigger problem if we knew from the beginning that he's telling the story. Do you remember the bit that introduces the scene in which Mike fatally encounters the power line? The narrator talks about the mind of God--a tall order! He may be playing here with the idea of omniscient narration, having a joke at his own expense--tweaking the idea of storytelling. Nobody (except a divine, all-seeing power) could possibly know all this stuff, but that doesn't need to get in the way of the story.
Washington, DC::
I found it interesting that the characters were unable to really have simple conversations with one another, but are able to be so randomly and overly intimate.
Jennifer Howard: Exactly. They can't communicate with each other. In this book, physical acts of intimacy are evidence of estrangement.
Virginia:
Jennifer, I think that having this online bookclub forum is great. Is there a list online where I can see the books that you will be reviewing?
Jennifer Howard: I'm glad you're enjoying the discussions. We've been having a lot of fun doing them. Our online producer will post a link at the end of the session. Next month, be sure to join my Book World colleague Kunio Francis Tanabe for a discussion of Barbara Kingsolver's "Prodigal Summer," which will take place Monday, Sept. 24 at noon on washingtonpost.com.
Jennifer Howard: That's it for today. Thanks for your good questions and comments. See you next time.
washingtonpost.com:
That wraps up today's show. Thanks to everyone who joined the
discussion. To see the latest in what's going on with the Bookclub, please check out the Washington Post Book Club section.
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