I tried over and over to read this but just could not get into it. Finally gave up and gave it away.

Fucking family. Feeble and forlorn and floundering and foolish and frustrating and functional and sad, sad. Fucking family. Fiend or foe.

Likely Ang Lee's film remains superior. The struggle is apparent here. One trying to rationalize one's upbringing is always a fool's errand. Moody appears to halt before the warmth. He's perhaps too keen to be clinical.

You know on maths test papers where you don't get marks for the right answer, but for showing your working? Well, I don't know about you, but I don't want to be able to "see the working" in a novel. I want to be absorbed, engrossed, and moved to the extent that the literary devices wash right over me.

The Ice Storm felt like the output from an ambitious student on a creative writing course. One who has read too much Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon, but just can't pull it off. Far too great a reliance on coincidence and dramatic irony, and it seemed to think it was being way edgier than it actually was. Also, the overuse of 70s references started to feel a bit desperate after a while.

Rick Moody can turn a phrase, but a bunch of clever sentences one after another do not a good novel make.

In summary: way too try-hard

Painful, painful, painful! Maybe I'm just not high brow enough, or literate enough, but this book was painful, and not in a good way. It felt like it was trying so hard to be so deep but ended up just being so awful. When the best part of a book is the effect the electrocution of 14 year old boy has on his family and sorta kinda girlfriend, which mind you doesn't even happen until the last 40-50 pages? I almost masochistically want to see the movie now to see if it too is as dreadful as this book!

I actually prefer the screenplay and film, which almost never happens.

This book captures that point in time when everything seemed on the verge of shattering. Funny, touching, amazing.

I first read this after seeing the movie when it came out (1997), and I remember thinking the story was so edgy and cool and retro and challenging (I was seventeen), and so in a way this reread almost thirty (ack) years later was as much about revisiting my former self-as-reader as it was about revisiting the story. It was good and the sentence-level writing is masterful—just really, really fresh and thoughtful and skilled—but I also recognized in the narrative (as opposed to the style—the way the narrative is told) the hallmarks of a Certain Type of Story written by a Certain Type of [Young Male] Writer in a Certain Era (look at who else was popular during this time), and a lot of it gave me the ick in places where I think I was intended to feel recognition and reassurance that I wasn’t alone in my simple white, middle-class, suburban perversions. Anyhoooooo, I enjoyed working my way through this as “problematic lit from the recent past,” and I always appreciate these opportunities to go back in time and observe my old self too. Cheers to our growth as individuals and as a community of consumers of art.

I was compelled by most of this book even in spite of having seen the movie a bunch of times. I guess I like a 1970s pastiche and I liked imagining Sigourney Weaver (who doesn't). And the writing was good like good solid sentences. I liked them. But by the end here I just feel reaffirmed in my stance that men shouldn't really be allowed to make art, or at least I shouldn't partake of it.