My favorite passages in the Ice Storm were the ones where the narrator steps away from the point of view of a particular character and riffs on a particular cultural element of the era - politics, style, music, TV, comic books, religion, et.al. Rick Moody uses that moment in American social, cultural and political history, lashed both literally and metaphorically by a deadly ice storm, to recount the demise of the American family, both literally and metaphorically.

I started college in the fall of 1973, leaving home at 18 to navigate a world in which a presidency was killing itself off with hubris, a world began its long slow burn with the oil embargo that followed the Yom Kippur War, my crime-ridden city (New York) was on the verge of bankruptcy (both literal and metaphorical), and culture was in the last stages of abandoning the utopian ideals of the 60s in favor of the dissolute self-absorption of the 'Me Decade'. If America 'lost its innocence' in the wake of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, a decade later, in the wake of Nixon's Watergate scandal and the arrival of the sexual revolution in a buttoned up suburb, America's jaded and browbeaten heart and soul have completely frozen over. The tony suburban setting is crucial to where the characters are at the start of the book and where they end up after the events of the day (and night). But the setting is as much a character as the characters who people that setting - New Canaan, Connecticut, on Thanksgiving, 1973. They are interesting but they are too damaged and dysfunctional to relate to. The human characters are not exactly charismatic, not likable in any sense. My favorite character in The Ice Storm is 1973. That the narration is good helps, of course, but what I'm really referring to is the author's narrative voice, especially as he shifts his perspective among the four Hood family members and occasionally throws in his own personal musings. When I had a chance to get the audio edition, I thought it might be a better listen than a read, and that proved to be true. Just 30-40 pages in, I lost the book, and I did not rush out to replace it.

I had originally tried reading the book in print but had difficulty getting into it. The narrative voice, paraphrasing what its characters are saying and thinking rather than quoting them directly via dialogue, makes it quite a good listen.

The ice storm by rick moody