SJane

The American literati bristled last year when one of the Nobel Prize bigwigs said the country’s writers were too entangled with their own mass culture to get close to a new Nobel in Literature. I don’t think that’s entirely true, but after reading "The Ice Storm" I have to say I suspect the Swedish bigwig was reading Rick Moody.

Not that I didn’t like the book. But having been alive and fully conscious in the 1970’s, I knew the dozens of TV shows and pop songs Moody referenced. To be honest, the ‘70’s have always struck me as somewhat grotesque, and now I’m sure. I also dislike the state of Connecticut. Yes, unhappy marriages and adolescent anxiety are universals, but would you be able to enjoy this book if you weren’t of a certain age, and accidentally American? I’d be interested to know. I guess you could accuse Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” of the same kind of thing, but its sinister appeal is wider and it is less anchored to American icons, in my opinion.

Considering the number of hard-ons I had to read to the end in "The Ice Storm," I was glad I was born a girl and not a boy. Anyway, the writing is good, the story has its hooks and the last 85 pages or so of this book were just terrific. Does that make it worth it? Yes, though I could imagine a lot of non-North Americans getting frustrated by the cultural allusions.

My step-mother tells me to try "Purple America," and I’m going to think about that.