SOURCE: “Dropping Out,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 20, 1995, p. 3.

In the following review of The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven, Eder commends Moody's narrative skill and humor, but concludes that the stories in this collection are marred by literary artifice and “a lack of authorial conviction.”

If Rick Moody were an innkeeper instead of a story writer, his guests would admire the striking decor of the rooms but be less pleased, perhaps, at finding Moody lying in the bed.

The title novella and many of the stories in The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven have both a surface and an expressive brilliance, purposefully undermined and distressed in various up-to-date literary ways. There is a cold, comic touch of Donald Barthelme in the obsessive journal of a man who tapes his wife's telephone calls; a suggestion of Woody Allen's hyper-rational schlemiel in the monologue of...