- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber (19 Aug 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571200613
- ISBN-13: 978-0571200610
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.6 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,272,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
THE GUARDIAN
'THE ICE STORM is one of the wittiest books about family life ever written'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'Impressive... An auspicious debut.' New York Times Book Review
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First Sentence
Drizzle coated Haledon, N.J., with a sad, ruinous sheen. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Drizzle coated Haledon, N.J., with a sad, ruinous sheen. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This unprepossessing novel plunged me into a mid-20s crisis. How tragic and how common it is to lose your way, like these characters, and fail to live up to the potential your schoolteachers crowed about! How nice it is to wallow in self-pity and angst, fuelled by a narrative as elegant as Garden State!
With a dense, poetic voice, and a plot that sort of boils up from within its New Jersey setting and then recedes again, this novel takes its time to settle into a rhythm, but is insidiously fascinating once it does. We don't expect much from any of these characters, and they don't seem to expect much from themselves either.
The confessional tone established by Moody's foreword adds a nice sense of immediacy.
Although it seems self-indulgent at first, with its emphasis on a set of characters who are miserable, bored, self-obsessed and self-destructive, it's an absorbing read, if you can relate their disenchantment to your own.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The plot of this book is as thin as a butterfly wing, but that doesn't detract from how good it is. I think this book will only be dearly loved by those that feel anything in their own lives has mirrored those of the characters.
Twenty-something failures that didn't 'make it big' on all their old teenage dreams. Apparently Moody has basically disowned this book, which I feel sad about because I picked this book off the shelf by chance, and was mesmerised by the beautiful use of language in a story that has no real heroes. Just people trying to get on with their lives.
I've read this book 5 times now, because Moody's writing is almost poetic in his use of alliteration, simile and metaphor. If T S Eliot had written a book about burned out young adults in Hoboken New Jersey, I think it would have turned out a lot like this book.
Twenty-something failures that didn't 'make it big' on all their old teenage dreams. Apparently Moody has basically disowned this book, which I feel sad about because I picked this book off the shelf by chance, and was mesmerised by the beautiful use of language in a story that has no real heroes. Just people trying to get on with their lives.
I've read this book 5 times now, because Moody's writing is almost poetic in his use of alliteration, simile and metaphor. If T S Eliot had written a book about burned out young adults in Hoboken New Jersey, I think it would have turned out a lot like this book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Upon picking up Rick Moody's Garden State,one might think it to be representative of the current trend of hip fiction: rife with drugs, sex, profane dialogue,and stark prose. As it happens it has all of these but the last; Moody's writing is dense and wordy, more so than the subject matter seems to merit. At times I had to read passages two or three times to understand what was going on- sticky metaphors are used in places where a more straightforward narrative might have been more elegant.
Moody spins a trendily downbeat tale, with angstful and interchangeable twenty-somethings desperately spinning through prettily rendered New Jersey wastelands, going nowhere in particular. Characters drift in and out of the different plots- among them the saga of a floundering rock band and the homecoming of an unbalanced prodigal son- which always seem about to converge but never quite do. Three-quarters of the way through the book I was unsure where the book was going, and by the end I didn't care. Vivid imagery can only go so far: Rick Moody can write, but in Garden State he has written something I didn't care to read.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The first collection of Rick Moody's short stories.
"The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven" is a precursor of Moody's later short story collection "Demonology" (2001)- personally I think the later collection is superior, but... Read more
Published on 4 April 2003 by Jason Parkes
Great debut novel.
I am very happy that 'Garden State' has been reissued in the wake of 'The Black Veil' and 'Demonology' that have added to Moody's profile since the adaptation of 'The Ice Storm'. Read more
Published on 12 Sep 2002 by Jason Parkes
urban decay... and james dean.
in this collection of short stories (and 1 novella) moody covers many topics, most often the claustrophobia of modern society, from the james dean garage band to the ring of... Read more
Published on 8 April 2001
A wonderful first novel, very dark but comic in it's way
Rich Moody won a Pushcart award for this. Nominations for the award come from editors who would have liked to publish a book, but couldn't usually for commercial reasons. Read more
Published on 27 July 1999
A wonderful first novel, very dark but comic in it's way
Rich Moody won a Pushcart award for this. Nominations for the award come from editors who would have liked to publish a book, but couldn't usually for commercial reasons. Read more
Published on 26 July 1999
Gray, but just like Jersey
Although I dressed really strange in college and high school (I wore the "big black boots" before it was popular for EVERYONE to wear them), and hung out with people who... Read more
Published on 17 July 1998
un-riveting
The first thing that annoyed me about this book was that I kept having to reread sections to follow where Moody was going. Read more
Published on 7 July 1998
A big book trapped in a little book's body
One of the best things about 'discovering' a wonderful writer is reading everything else they've published, not just the one you liked first. Garden State is Moody's first novel. Read more
Published on 20 Nov 1997
A fantastic first novel. Read this book.
Rick Moody mentions Astral Weeks in his introduction. There are worse reasons to read a book, I think.
Published on 28 Oct 1997
This is New Jersey, alright
The author writes well, indeed, but of a generation that may not be the reader's. At that point, the book becomes uninteresting. Read more
Published on 13 Sep 1997
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