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Rick Moody once seemed among the most unlikely of writers to grow bored with himself. After satirising his Nixon-era Wasp childhood in his best-known novel, The Ice Storm, he chronicled his history of drug and alcohol abuse in a memoir titled The Black Veil.
But as he sips herbal tea in a Brooklyn cafe, Moody says he now finds himself a dull subject. The Black Veil belongs to a different era. He submitted the final draft on September 10, 2001. "After 9/11, I really wanted to deal with the culture as a whole instead of just navel-gazing."
The three novellas of his latest book, The Omega Force, explore post-September 11 paranoia. K&K follows a drudge at an insurance brokerage who unravels the mystery of a colleague posting menacing notes in the suggestion box. The Albertine Notes is cyberpunk sci-fi set in a bomb-flattened Manhattan. And, in the title story, a retired government official is convinced his sanctum is being invaded by foreigners.
In Moody's view, the protagonists of the three novellas "have a mania that induces them to interpret wrongly. It's the illness of the Bush Administration to be constantly imagining conspiracies".
With his disaffected characters and hip style, Moody is sometimes grouped alongside Dave Eggers and Jeffrey Eugenides as a generation of American postmodernists reacting against their realist forebears. But there's little conventionally cool about Moody. A slight man of 46, he wears a beige cardigan over a faded T-shirt. Off alcohol and nicotine (as well as sugar, caffeine and meat) he practises yoga, plays in a folk band and goes to church.
It was returning to the church, in which he was raised, that helped restore Moody's mental health after he suffered an alcohol and drug-fuelled breakdown at 25.
Accustomed to writing while intoxicated, it took six months after sobering up in rehab to write again. But, he says, drying out made him a better writer. "Emotionally you can't really understand other people when you're drinking."
Moody doesn't regret his years of substance abuse, since it was "something I had to go through to be the person I am now. Seeing as it's a problem in my family as a whole, there wasn't a lot of chance that I wasn't going to do it."
Of all his books The Ice Storm remains his most famous which is "Hollywood's fault, not mine," he says. The story of the moral decay of two families has become an acclaimed film but Moody dismisses the book as an apprentice work. "There's not a sentence in it I would memorise. It just doesn't sing."
Moody's family was hurt, but understanding about the autobiographical elements in The Ice Storm. "They recognise that writing is how I try to handle stuff," he says, "it's not very fictionalised at all".
Moody's mother divorced his father, an investment banker, in 1970, creating a wound that Moody struggled to resolve even as an adult.
The death of his elder sister, Meredith, from a seizure, aged 38, was a watershed for Moody. He became heavily involved with Meredith's children.
Subsequently he decided to marry his partner, environmentalist Amy Osborne, and have children of his own. "I'd been until then too preoccupied with my own trajectory as a writer to think much about kids." Moody's shift towards gazing outward rather than inward will reach a new level with his next novel, partly set on Mars. It will be even more dystopian than The Albertine Notes, Moody says, but he's cheerful because - not in spite - of his despairing outlook. "My belief in the exploitative nature of human psychology frees me up to feel good about things. I expect the worst of people and institutions. When they do not perform to type, I'm surprised and delighted."
- Detours, HoS
