Who was that masked man? It might just be Rick Moody.

Seems he's been wearing a handkerchief or black veil over his face occasionally as part of his research into a freewheeling nonfiction book about a long-ago relative nicknamed Handkerchief Moody.

Handkerchief—who died in 1820—donned the veil for the last 10 or 15 years of his life out of remorse for having accidentally killed his best childhood friend with a firearm.

Moody has worn the veil at the Yaddo arts colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., much to the consternation of many of those around him.

The story of Handkerchief Moody is the latest work planned by the author of Garden State, The Ice Storm, The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven and Purple America, which has just been released in paperback. The Ice Storm was made into a critically acclaimed film last year, starring Kevin Kline and directed by director Ang Lee.

In Purple America, Moody writes about the meltdown of a nuclear family in Connecticut. Dexter “Hex” Raitliffe has been summoned home from New York to take care of his mother, Billie Raitliffe, severely incapacitated by advanced stages of a neurological disease after she has been abandoned by her husband, Louis Sloane, Hex's stepfather.

The novel, the second sentence of which is a sprawling run-on affair reminiscent of James Joyce, tells how the alcoholic Hex takes on his mother's care, bathing and dressing her and fending off her requests he relieve her of her misery at some point in the future. That last part, incidentally, grew out of Moody's own mother's interest in the Hemlock Society. “I don't think she's a card-carrying member,” he said in a recent interview. “She talks about it.”

Billie's vocal cords have been so weakened she can only communicate through a computerized vocal synthesizer. Meanwhile, Louis Sloane is taking the fall for an incident at the nuclear power plant where he has until recently worked. Despite its heavy subject matter, Purple America is often humorous and thoroughly engaging.

Moody says his mother was not the basis for Billie Raitliffe, that in fact his mother has never had a debilitating disease. The inspiration for Billie's disease, he said, came from one of his earliest novelist heroes, Stanley Elkin, who suffered from multiple sclerosis.

Concerning some of the difficult topics in his books, including the Oedipal tension in Purple America and the drug addiction and sexual compulsion in The Ring of Brightest Angels, Moody says: “I'm naturally drawn to stuff you're not supposed to talk about. … I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about. … Literature is about interior states and emotional states, about what people think that they don't always say to their neighbors. I'm drawn magnetically with my tangled long sentences to those spots people don't want to talk about.”

Moody, 36, was born in Manhattan and reared primarily in the privileged suburbs of Connecticut, including New Canaan, the setting for The Ice Storm.

He earned a bachelor's in English at Brown University, where he studied with novelist John Hawkes, who died earlier this month. One of his fond recollections of Hawkes is of the author of “Blood Oranges” bringing wine to all his classes and of class members firing champagne corks into the street from the porch of the house where they had gathered for their last session.

Moody later received a master's degree in fine arts from Columbia and spent five years in the publishing industry and then some more time “making it small” before having his first novel, Garden State, published in 1992.

“I always wrote as a kid,” he says, observing he even started and abandoned two novels when he was 12. “As a teenager I was always scribbling, writing love poems to girls. … I was always driven and attracted to narrative as an art.”

In addition to writing, Moody, who is single and lives in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., teaches at Bennington College in Vermont and at the New School for Social Research in New York. Last fall, he co-edited with Darcey Steinke a collection of contemporary writings about the New Testament called Joyful Noise.

He says that although a routine used to be important to him, he now just lets “inspiration happen.”

Moody says that he especially loves writing on the road, because “the phone doesn't ring very much.” He works on a laptop, usually while listening to experimental music—“music without lyrics”—by such composers as Philip Glass and John Cage. “Indian classical music is really very good,” he adds.

In addition to working on “the Black Veil project,” Moody is writing another novel. And as for that handkerchief, he says, “I don't claim to be through wearing it yet.”