"A consciousness in which the sense of guilt luxuriates like
noisome growths in a swamp." That's how critic Newton Arvin once
described Nathaniel Hawthorne, but it applies just as well to Rick
Moody and his latest book, THE BLACK VEIL. A memoir by the author
of THE ICE STORM, PURPLE AMERICA, and DEMONOLOGY, this is no
vicariously thrilling romp through the debauched life of an
emotionally tortured young author, despite what the jacket copy
promises. It's a difficult read. Moody's not the type to take you
straight from A to Z in a nice, tidy line, leaving you with the
satisfaction of a story arc described and completed. Nope --- he
circles his subject like a prowling animal, viewing it from all
angles and in every possible light, examining it to such a degree
that by the time he finally pounces at it --- if he pounces at it
--- the moment has lost its importance, and you realize that the
predatory circling was the whole point all along.

In the case of THE BLACK VEIL, the subject would seem to be harder
to avoid, as it is, to a large degree, Moody himself. But he
manages. The book's subtitle is "A Memoir with Digressions," but it
might have been more accurately called "A Memoir of
Digressions." Moody intersperses episodes from his childhood and
his early 20s --- when he was institutionalized for mental problems
that included paranoia, depression, and alcoholism --- with
critical analyses of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The
Minister's Black Veil."

The combination makes for rough going at times, a fact Moody
acknowledges. (He warns readers in the introduction that "My book
and my life are written in fits, more like epilepsy than like a
narrative"; later, he pleads with us not to skip over the parts of
the book that move more slowly.) The sections about his youthful
excesses, his self-destructive abuse of drugs and alcohol and other
people, are sympathetic and often funny ("I'm afraid I might be
made of plastic. So I think I have to turn myself in," Moody tells
some friends while in the panicky grip of hallucinogens). But then
he keeps going back to Hawthorne and that veil. "Horace, scribe of
antiquity, remarked in his 'Ars Poetica' that things repeated are
pleasing, and Hawthorne must have been keenly observant of the
strategy, since...he found himself unable to avoid reprising the
same tangle of ambiguities that linger around his principal garment
from 'The Minister's Black Veil,'" Moody writes --- but he's hardly
one to talk.

If his obsession with Hawthorne and the veil seems insane at first,
it soon takes on a satisfying rhythm, becoming a macrocosmic
version of one of Moody's endless sentences. A trained musician,
Moody has said that he writes with jazz always in mind. So his
sentences sound like terrific solo improvisations on a theme,
meticulously arranged but with a loose, casual feel, and
referencing favorite quotations as a jazz solo would; for example:
"...everything in my adult life seems to have hinged on this
morning, including my need to search for my ancestor Handkerchief
Moody, but my heart is faint, as you might suppose, diverse and
confused, and by writing these things I am afraid of conjuring
them, and though I do not believe that melancholy is about
anything, I am afraid, and my brain is troubled by reason of a
melancholy juice bred in it, so I choose merely to give the idea
that appeared to serve as the trigger of this disease hot and dry
or cold and dry or pale and ruddy, this disease."

In the end, it doesn't really matter whether Moody's efforts to
link Joseph "Handkerchief" Moody --- Hawthorne's inspiration for
his tale --- to his own family line are successful. The real
subject this memoir is circling --- the guilt and helpless
isolation that inspired Hawthorne's minister to hide his face from
the world for the rest of his life --- doesn't travel along family
lines. What Moody is writing about is a universal veil; in some way
we all wear it, even if it manages to veil itself from us. Odd that
the one commonality among humans --- the one thing that links us
all, from Handkerchief Moody to murderous teen Kip Kinkel to
"accidental" killer William Burroughs to the author himself and
each of his readers --- is our dreadful, inescapable isolation. The
veil that separates us from one another is the one thing we all
share. As Hawthorne's veiled minister said on his deathbed, "I look
around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil."