SOURCE: “Old-Fashioned Families,” in Times Literary Supplement, August 5, 1994, p. 18.

In the following review, Harrison offers a favorable assessment of The Ice Storm.

New Canaan, the setting for Rick Moody's second novel, The Ice Storm, is a suburb from Hell. Understandably, the people who live there have problems. Ben Hood, “the dad in what follows,” thinks love is “close to indebtedness” and has married Elena to pay the debt. She simply believes he proposed “out of lack of imagination.” Their son, Paul, is a “garbage head … a loser,” incapable of spending a straight and sober day at his exclusive boarding-school. During the winter-holiday weekend in 1973, in which the novel takes place, the behaviour of Wendy, the Hoods’ daughter, suggests that the numbing orthodoxy of New Canaan would send anyone into sexual ferment. Even her parents spend Saturday evening at a party where a woman's partner for the night is...