Moody by nature

Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm, tells Sinéad Gleeson why he dislikes being labelled, has visited Sandymount, and thinks going to church isn't 'totally uncool'

Joyce and Beckett are among his favourite writers. "I'm a huge fan of both. After Brown University, I went to Dublin and did that whole Ulysses pilgrimage thing out to Sandymount Tower.

"Among writers in the US, it's bad to admit to going to church, it's totally uncool. But I find myself in this paradoxical position of finding some value in it and then being ashamed of myself among my intellectual peers.

"I don't mind comparisons to John Cheever or John Updike but I think it's based on a WASP culture thing, which is a slight slur. It's like saying that all Jewish writers are like Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud or Saul Bellow."

Rick Moody's voice hits a jaded pitch down the line from his home in Brooklyn, ahead of his visit to Ireland for the Cúirt Literature Festival. Tired of the suburban-writer label, he's had more stinging criticism than that. A trawl of the web throws up as much gushing praise for his writing as accusations of pretension. His work shirks pigeonholing; his last book, The Black Veil, is essentially a memoir, but Moody dislikes that tag.

"I think of it as a novel, but more in the European than American tradition, like Proust and WG Sebald. It contains aspects of memoir, and it's all true, but strategically its form has a lot to do with my interest in European literature."

Again and again in his writing, the structure seems simultaneously unfettered and rigid, with every word marked by its edginess. Rick Moody upends genre and rebuts the notion of traditional form. On the surface, his best-known book, The Ice Storm, is the story of a disintegrating, dysfunctional family in 1970s Middle America. What most people miss – possibly because it is lacking in the film version (which starred Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver) is its inherent politics.

"It seems like a domestic narrative but people overlook the political dimension, but to me all of my books are political. Part of the reason that The Black Veil took so much shit was because of its specific political perspective (the last chapter says that American history is founded on murder and genocide). In all my books, I try to embody certain political ideas without being a boring polemical writer".

Whatever Moody is, he's not a boring writer and, in conversation, he is passionate and knowledgeable on many subjects. Writing is something that rarely passes out of the orb of topics we discuss. His best friend, Jeffrey Eugenides, wrote Middlesex and name-checks Moody in his first book, The Virgin Suicides.

"I had grave doubts about my ability to have a career as a writer especially as Jeff was smarter and a lot more verbally facile than me," he jokes. Both studied creative writing at Brown University and had experimental-writer John Hawkes and novelist Angela Carter as teachers.

Moody read voraciously as a child and attempted a novel before he hit his teenage years. The Black Veil divides itself between the political and the very personal. It details his years of drink and drug abuse, but the core element focuses on he and his father trying to discover their ancestral connection to a Nathaniel Hawthorne character, Handkerchief Moody.

"My father is an interesting, hard-to-get-to person. I felt like the book was an intimate way to explore the father-son relationship." Dotted throughout his books is the recurrent theme of accident and coincidence, something I tell him, reminds me of another New York writer, Paul Auster.

"It's funny. I like Paul's work and we've both come from under that (Nathaniel) Hawthorne skirt. We're huge fans of his and Hawthorne was very interested in coincidence and that old folkloric narrative structure, so both of us get that in our writing."

Moody also admires writers who depict consciousness as it happens, like Thoreau and Emerson, and unsurprisingly counts Joyce and Beckett among his favourite writers.

Moody cites both writers for the connection between music and language in their work. He has dabbled in music writing (contributing to the Wilco book and writing about Talking Heads for the Guardian) and regards music as an intrinsic part of expression.

"Music helps me out compositionally. A lot of contemporary fiction in the US is cinematically orientated, in that it's obsessed with observation and appearance, not with sound. A lot of writers I like were musical; Joyce was a great singer and Beckett could play the piano. They both had an interest in literature and language as music. I know Finnegan's Wake is not an easy read, but if you read it aloud, you hear the tremendous beauty of the whole thing. I try to get my language to rise to the condition of music but without it calling attention to itself or interrupting the narrative."

The Black Veil was written a few years after Purple America, the story of a man looking after his disabled mother, and describes both books as "difficult, elevated and at the arty, experimental end of literature". A New York Times reviewer said the latter was "steeped in rage", something Moody says made him re-examine his own work.

"I found that line interesting because it made me see that there's more wrath in my books than I think there is. I try to include all the tonal colours, so that funny passages lie cheek by jowl with melancholy passages."

By his own admission his recent work is more story-oriented than The Black Veil; in the past he edited Joyful Noise, a collection of writings on the Bible. So what prompted his involvement? "I grew up with the church but got more interested in it as a teen and in my 20s than when I was a kid. Among writers in the US, it's bad to admit to going to church, it's totally uncool. But I find myself in this paradoxical position of finding some value in it and then being ashamed of myself among my intellectual peers. The book was my way of trying to map out some background to the church that could be considered of intellectual benefit."

Moody's new book, The Diviners, may continue this theme of religiosity but over here, readers will have to wait until early 2006 to find out.