Rick Moody: The Black Veil

**mansaturday** · 06-May-2009, 23:11

The Black Veil (2002) is autobiographical memoir, a story of addiction and genealogy. Problems start way back:

?My mother's mother ... lay in her massive bed in Pelham, with her liver giving out, when I was very small. My mother said to us, Come on in and say hello to your grandmother. But I didn't want to catch what she had. And I did.?

The naturalistic scenario is Zola, but the spare ?And I did? is modern and laconic.

Moody observes a fellow patient pretending to play cards with a catatonic Haitian girl in the psychiatric centre. Stan has permanently ruined his head by necking 70 acid tabs:

?This is a face card, but it?s not an actual face, it?s a two-dimensional representation of a face, and an ace isn?t a face, and a face isn?t from space, and the game isn?t a race, and I?m going to be the one to deal, because I got a feel for the deal, the real deal, it isn?t a steal, and it isn?t a base, which rhymes with a face.?

Stan?s logic carries its own rules. Although he appears to be able to distinguish the real from the representational, his conversation moves thru rhymes and resemblances rather than thru reason.

Powerful stuff.

**mansaturday** · 07-May-2009, 07:21

I got so carried away with the addiction that I clean (pun intended) forgot to say anything about the veil itself. It was another Moody - the Reverend Joseph - who accidentally shot a friend of his dead, later provoking him to continuously wear a black veil as a kind of penance. Nathaniel Hawthorne adapted this story as "The Ministers's Black Veil".

Much of the book is taken up with Rick Moody chasing his ancestral history and is crammed with digressions about such things as the Isles of Shoals, Moody's Motel and Cabins in Maine, or gushing references to nocturnal emissions in Joseph's diary, which was written in coded Latin. Addictions and digressions? Yes, David Foster Wallace's shadow looms large over this book. Engrossing.