Volume 49, Number 14 · September 26, 2002
Guilt Stalker
By Benjamin DeMott
The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions
by Rick Moody
Little, Brown, 323 pp., $24.95
Purple America (1997), Rick Moody's most recent novel, begins with a remembered family Christmas gift-giving scene. Receiving the gift is Billie Raitcliff, a Connecticut matron afflicted with an incapacitating neuromuscular disease. The excited gift-givers are Billie's son and husband. The present is a Dell 'notebook-style computer' with a voice synthesizer that will enable Billie to 'talk' as long as she can click a mouse. As the already pitiably disabled woman watches, her son scrolls A-words, intent on a choice—the 'perfect arrangement of euphony and content'—that will do justice to the gift. He chooses adore and hits Go:
Review, 4532 words
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