Night and Fog

The world is awash in blood, not the blood of war or civil strife but the blood of writers eager to tell the story of their lives. Incest, poverty, discrimination, death, disease, depression and addiction are worthy subjects, but confession comes too easy nowadays, and memoir too often an excuse to open the floodgates of the artistic life.

No wonder then that a writer as talented as Rick Moody would try a different route when chronicling his journey in “The Black Veil,” a journey that is less bloodletting than blood sport, with Moody playing hunter and prey. While the unrepressed word-slinging and slow evisceration of suburban lifestyles that he showed in “The Ice Storm” and “Purple America” are in full glory here, his personal story of despair, self-loathing, bourbon and pills takes center stage.

Moody’s road to confession begins with a small family story: When Nathaniel Hawthorne penned “The Minister’s Black Veil” in 1835, he drew upon an anecdote from the life of a clergyman from York, Maine, who one day greeted his congregation with a veil covering his face. This poor soul was Joseph Moody, rumored to be a distant relation, and was for Rick as a teen a certain claim to coolness. Yet when he entered the make-it-or-break-it years of young adulthood, the connection proved more ominous. Was Joseph really kin? Why did he wear the veil? Could the family be afflicted with some intergenerational disorder of disgrace and shame that he, somehow, contracted?

The answers, laid out in this “memoir with digressions,” come in the form of a postmodern mix, spiriting Thomas Browne and Hawthorne, Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace together with Moody’s own brand of humor and irony. If the result--part psychological and genealogical inquisition, part literary criticism, pop cultural exploration and historical exegesis--is a little ungainly, and assuredly it is, Moody gives fair warning.

“Readers in search of a tidy well-organized life in these pages, a life of kisses bestowed or of novels written, may be surprised,” he writes early on. “My book and my life are written in fits, more like epilepsy than like a narrative; or: the process of this work is obsessive and like all obsessions is protean, beginning with the burden of conscience ....”

Protean epileptic obsessions aside, when a writer thrusts a pen beneath the skin, certain expectations must be met. There ought to be some pain. Not to say there can’t be humor, but pain--either real or revelatory--must be evident. And local color, or the whole venture slips into a slough of solipsistic narcissism. And coherence: Meaning--or the struggle for meaning--should come clear in the structure of the story. In the case of “The Black Veil,” two out of three isn’t quite enough.

Moody’s pain began with his parents’ divorce in 1970, an event which we are led to believe precipitated his depression and a steady haze of soddenness that culminated on Christmas 1986, the nadir of his young life.

“Of dinner, I remember only the moment in which I boasted that I would not be alive on New Year’s Day, 2000,” he writes, a blithe claim that hides the very real knot of paranoia, morbid thinking and tunnel vision in which he found himself inextricably entangled.

” ... I slumped further into the cave dwelling part of my back brain. The lonely villain in a monster movie, a suzerain of reclusion, drinking, loathing myself, going out and feeling afraid, cynical, contemptuous, literally disgusted by my own shadow, by everything that had to do with me.... “

After checking himself in and out of a rehabilitation center in Queens, he goes on a driving trip with his father to “the ragged, fierce, melancholy coast of Maine,” where he hopes to seek out whatever connection exists between who he is and his 18th century doppelganger, Joseph Moody. It rains the entire week, but along the way he learns a thing or two about his family history.

Joseph Moody, it turns out, led an impossibly difficult life in the shadow of his father, a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and suffered a string of tragedies. As a child, he was charged with the accidental shooting death of a childhood friend and, later, after enduring a bout of unrequited love and a settling of sorts in marriage, he ended up burying his wife and child, both of whom died in childbirth: the culmination of which led--or so we are meant to believe--to the famous veiling.

Moody’s journey--and his book--begins promisingly but ends in a swirl of tangential references and biographical facts of interest only if you happen to be a Moody and are interested in the etymology of the family name or in a relative’s contribution to the construction of Boston’s South Station (taking in the finer points of New England marble quarrying) or in a contemporary’s lurching Goth-like into a Wal-Mart in order to purchase a bolt of fabric to stitch a veil for himself.

Along the way, Moody exhumes the work of such disparate critics as F.O. Matthiessen and Roland Barthes, weaves in accounts of 18th and 19th century village life and incorporates modern studies of impulsivity, courtesy of Kip Kinkel, the high-school shooter from Springfield, Ore., and William Burroughs, who shot his wife one afternoon in a drunken game of William Tell.

Perhaps most discouraging, he reveals that the thread connecting him to Joseph is more imaginary than real, a revelation that turns the promise of this story into nothing more than a ruse which no amount of spin can redeem.

In the end, “The Black Veil” only marginally delivers on the terms Moody establishes. Although his writing, wit and knowledge remain wonderfully intact, his larger ambition--an attempt, it seems, to draw parallels between life in colonial America and life in the Republic today--becomes a mere projection of his own self-loathing, a Jonathan Edwards-like rant against demons of his own design.

The fog finally lifts in Moody’s life when he sells his second novel, “The Ice Storm,” a conclusion which, as honest as it may be, diminishes the scope of his story and the deeper implications of his travail. Occasionally wonderful and intriguing, more often unruly and maddening, “The Black Veil” disappointingly collapses under its own undisciplined scheme.