SOURCE: “The Way It Was,” in Saturday Night, Vol. 112, No. 10, December 1997–January 1998, p. 14.

In the following review of The Ice Storm, Moher objects to Moody's portrayal of New Canaan suburbanites as effete and aimless, citing as evidence his own positive experiences in New Canaan as a teenager during the early 1970s.

I entered high school in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1969, which makes me precisely contemporary with the teenage characters in Rick Moody's novel The Ice Storm, now a movie by Ang Lee. The Ice Storm is an anthropological dig into post-sixties confusion and suburban ennui. It makes New Canaan out to be a sort of Peyton Place with bell-bottoms, a “desolate village” where parents swap mates at “key parties” and their children are as forlorn as abandoned puppies. But it all looked pretty different to a thirteen-year-old kid recently arrived off the Canadian prairies.

I had gone to...