Have just finished The Ice Storm and been left a bit ambivalent, which is, in retrospect, fairly unsurprising. Coming across as a sort of Catcher in the Rye crossed with American Beauty (although of course in that sense it anticipates the latter), it's about America in the seventies, and suburbia, and the family life, sexual mores and consumer kitsch that resided therein, none of which are literary topics particularly dear to my heart; even worse, it uses the device of focusing on a troubled family as a microcosm for Society (obvious metaphors abound, and are even explicitly referred to in one passage) - the sort of premise that usually makes me run a mile when executed in this kind of literary-plausible vein (as opposed to, say, the brilliantly stylised, literary-implausible portrait in White Noise).
But while I didn't particularly enjoy the novel, and don't feel in any way inspired or enlightened by having read it, I nonetheless found that I'd finished it very quickly, and there's no denying that it does have a certain breezy charm - a cleverness - and the feel of a kind of honesty...
The narrative - the series of extended vignettes depicting the Hood family, New Canaan (a name and a half!) and, yes, the quiet rottenness of society (or at least that part of it which resided in Moody's chosen milieu) - seems to unravel, rather than following a more conventional path, and if the consequence is that the novel sometimes seems a little awkwardly paced in moving through its various arcs and crises, and its component sub-narratives not entirely synchronised, well, that's probably appropriate given its subject matter. It's littered (an appropriate word) with catalogue-style pop-cultural references that quickly grow tedious - which is, admittedly, probably their intended effect, but I couldn't help but feel that I was being hit over the head by the idea of cultural/moral exhaustion rather too obviously. And the characters? Well, I can't make up my mind as to whether they're rather subtly evoked or just poorly fleshed-out figures weighed down by their quasi-archetypal nature (rather more the latter, I think).
Ultimately, though, I think that the thing about The Ice Storm which really left me feeling unsatisfied was its lack of any kind of centre - no moral centre, no intellectual centre, no characters with whom I could genuinely empathise, no real sense of hope/redemption/any real way forward (except, perhaps, ambiguously and not entirely convincingly, in the closing paragraphs). Maybe, in a way which has nothing to do with my lack of personal exposure to key parties, fractured marriages or late Nixon-era America, Moody's canvas, and his vision of truth, are just too far removed from my own.
