5/7/2023 0 Comments The Ice Storm by Rick Moody![]() ![]() Because of the extended paraphrases and quotations and references that bolster and bracket each character’s point of view, the Hoods certainly seem to be emblematic of their time, which makes their emotional isolation, the private and solitary nature of their disintegration, all the more poignant, as if they’re cut off even from the sense-a faint comfort-that their problems are as broadly human as they are specific to a particular person, place and date. ![]() Informed by insights from Masters & Johnson and “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” and Marvel Comics and Creem, these four are playing out the defining act of their family drama-and that they’re each doing their parts separately says a lot about what’s happening to them. And in fact, the Hoods are having quite a day, which is to say, night. Because the Hoods live in the suburbs-in “the most congenial and superficially calm of suburbs”-we may be sure there’s plenty to uncover, all manner of unsuspected subterranean doings and undoings. In the midst of this exactingly reconstructed rubble we find the Hoods, a family of four. ![]() The argot, the foibles, the fads and the artifacts: They’re all here, meticulously catalogued and historically framed with discussions of the design, politics and groping psychology of the period. This is not so much a novel as an excavation-of that nearly but not quite extinct entity the nuclear family as it was in those dark ages, the 1970s. ![]()
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