[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 decided by the car keys she pulls from a bowl.

The novel builds up to this party and its terrible aftermath. And as Paul, having drugged his best friend, cudgels Libbets, an unwilling girl, “with good vibes,” his sister climbs into bed with Sandy Williams, her doomed boyfriend's prepubescent brother. Meanwhile, Elena tries to understand the orgy-to-be in terms which her self-improvement manuals have taught her are important. The remnants of the 1960s counter-culture just screw, young and old alike, in this pernicious New England place. Paul can only survive by being witlessly stoned, disappointed of the eternally unfulfilled promise of “liberated sexuality.” In New Canaan, in 1973, experiments with free love become malignant and destructive affairs. The liberated way in which Jim Williams explains his couplings with Elena to Wendy and Sandy, who are barely in their teens, pushes the reader helplessly in the direction of old-fashioned family values.

At the book's start there is a clear sense that the 1960s are over, since “much was in the recent past … Hendrix … Joplin … Morrison … the Beatles were recording solo albums.” There is layer on layer of contemporary detail—clothes and furniture, television programmes, articles in magazines and comics. Moody has done his research but the result can overwhelm the fact that the book is a retrospective; it exists in the present while it deals with the past. The identity of the suburb is, at first, established by the fact that there are “no answering machines. And no call waiting. No compact disc recorders or laser discs.” With a series of such hints, The Ice Storm asks that we look to today: to the young, who are saturated by the media (like Wendy, for whom “television served as the structured time”), or drugged-up and cynical (like Paul, who knows it's all “relationships and politics and power”).

Rick Moody telescopes time impressively in a novel which is both serious and fully redolent of the cheesy 1970s. He does so while writing about the full terror of holidays and suggesting that, regardless of advances in technology and study, families can give the worst pain.