SOURCE: “Entering Gothic Suburbia, Where Dysfunction Romps Across Tidy Lawns,” in Chicago Tribune Books, May 29, 1994, p. 5.

In the following positive review of The Ice Storm, Begley commends Moody's “keen observation and sympathy for human suffering,” though finds shortcomings in the novel's unnecessary “literary flourishes.”

Novelists don't like to be lumped into categories or ushered into the unwelcome company of other, supposedly similar writers, but mankind is a classifying animal, and besides, really good writers outlast the labels applied to them. Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, a bitter and loving and damning tribute to the American family, belongs to a subgenre I think of as suburban Gothic-tidy lawns and two-car garages, all the vulgar complacencies of affluence, mixed with brooding horror, melodramatic violence, extreme psychological states.

There has been a mini-boom in suburban Gothic in the last year or so: first “The Virgin Suicides” by Jeff Eugenides, then “Elect...