SOURCE: “A Moody Kind of Suburbia,” in Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2001, p. E1.

In the following essay, Reynolds discusses Moody's literary career and relays the author's comments on his life and work.

To be fair, it is not highly professional to tell a tired writer on a book tour that you think he has a nice face. Some people might think you are, how do you say, “coming on to them.” But like a lot of Rick Moody's readers, I feel like I know him (every author's worst nightmare). He has become, for a generation of people in their 30s and 40s, a dark chronicler of American suburbia—mostly the East Coast variety, but it translates.

The 1997 movie version of Moody's 1994 novel, The Ice Storm, directed by the supremely stylish Ang Lee, clinched this reputation and widened his audience to include a whole new subspecies of Moody fans...