[In the following positive review of The Ice Storm, Begley commends Moody's “keen observation and sympathy for human suffering,” though finds shortcomings in the novel's unnecessary “literary flourishes.”]

Novelists don't like to be lumped into categories or ushered into the unwelcome company of other, supposedly similar writers, but mankind is a classifying animal, and besides, really good writers outlast the labels applied to them. Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, a bitter and loving and damning tribute to the American family, belongs to a subgenre I think of as suburban Gothic-tidy lawns and two-car garages, all the vulgar complacencies of affluence, mixed with brooding horror, melodramatic violence, extreme psychological states.

There has been a mini-boom in suburban Gothic in the last year or so: first “The Virgin Suicides” by Jeff Eugenides, then “Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World” by Donald Antrim. Both of these young novelists, like Moody, aim to expose the radical dysfunction of a superficially placid social order. And Eugenides, Antrim and Moody all make expert use of deadpan humor-for they know that the very idea of suburban Gothic, fantastical horror let loose in a prim, orderly neighborhood, is funny in a grim way.

In Eugenides’ novel a flock of teenage sisters commit serial suicide; in Antrim's an elementary school teacher incites his students to torture a classmate to death; in The Ice Storm a young boy wandering through a winter wreckage of downed powerlines is electrocuted when he sits on a roadside guardrail, an instrument of safety transformed into a means of execution. Lethal despair, lethal cruelty, lethal irony—in each case the violence is touched up with comic highlights, the absurd winking at the tragic.

Moody's novel takes place in New Canaan, Conn., during a single night in November 1973. In the background are Watergate, Vietnam and the lingering socio-sexual effects of the Summer of Love. In the foreground is a cataclysmic ice storm, a raw, wet night that turns treacherous with a snap freeze.

Skating awkwardly over the iced landscape is the unhappy Hood family: Benjamin, the father, a sodden securities analyst, primed for a binge; Elena, the mother, facing up belatedly to deep dissatisfactions, ripe for a fling; Paul, the teenage son, slipping from safety into comic-strip fantasy; Wendy, the teenage daughter, who is itching to sample love and sex.

Moody compresses years of estrangement and disillusion into one night of drugs and drinking, seduction and betrayal, felled trees, blackouts, car crashes—enough mayhem to keep the reader cringing in anticipation of the next disaster. But in fact the damage was done before the rain began to fall, before the temperature began to drop, when the Hoods formed bonds based on convention, predictable and soulless like the street plan of a subdivision. There is no communication; the “misshapen affection that bound these people”—love bottled up, gone sour—has no language. And yet they are family, a bad ending that endures.

Moody's contribution to suburban Gothic is a relentless drive to fix the moment. In The Ice Storm, his second novel, he piles up enough period detail—Helen Reddy singing “Delta Dawn,” the Wankel rotary engine—to make the Hood family meltdown seem like a time capsule, a warning for the ages. I was 14 in 1973, and obsessed, like the 13-year-old Wendy, with watching Watergate on TV; I can testify that Moody gets it right. Paul's self-pitying descent into boarding school anomie and his sloppy preppy uniform (wire-frame glasses, slept-in tweed jacket, khakis, untucked shirt) are both uncomfortably familiar.

Moody is more committed to realism than either Eugenides or Antrim; many of his Gothic effects are the consequence of the ice storm. There is the downed powerline, the deadly live wire: “And it danced. The jig of the dervish, of delirious and religious mad persons, of hyperactive children and their weary parents.”

How dangerous when disconnected, the links that power domesticity! Burst pipes flood the Hoods’ house, a cascading stream of water that leaves a brownish “Rorschach stain” in which you can read the trauma of a family in crisis.

I wish Moody had not felt the need to embellish his novel with literary flourishes. His narrator, whose identity is concealed until the last pages, is arch and painfully self-conscious: “Okay, the time has come in this account for a characterization of the mind of God.” No thanks.

A lovely scene in which Benjamin and Wendy nearly make a true father-daughter connection is spoiled by a forced, jokey echo of the famous last paragraph of James Joyce's “The Dead”: “The precipitation,” Moody writes, “fell with relentless uniformity. On nearby communities with less affluent tax bases—Stamford and Norwalk—as well as on New Canaan's wealthy.”

But this is a good book, packed with keen observation and sympathy for human failure. With any luck Moody will one day write a novel that outstrips classification, that launches him into the orbit of writers beyond compare.