Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview… a 1970s Connecticut housewife with a sense of quiet desperation about her. Elena’s life consists of throwing and attending dinner parties, cooking meals for her ungrateful children, and ignoring her husband’s blatant infidelities. In order to get a few kicks of her own, she’s taken to shoplifting. But when she finds that the simple pleasures in life aren’t so pleasurable anymore, she decides that she needs a larger, more fundamental change.
Personality... uptight, unhappy, and fed-up with her staid existence. Elena has never been one to make much of a fuss, but that may be exactly her problem. She’s tired of her husband’s duplicitousness, but is just as insecure about her own prudishness. She needs to take control of her life or nothing important will ever improve.
Get to Know her in...
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In the weekend after thanksgiving 1973 the Hoods are skidding out of control. Benjamin Hood reels from drink to drink, trying not to think about his trouble at the office. His wife, Elena, is reading self help books and losing patience with her husband's lies. Their son, Paul, home for the holidays, escapes to the city to pursue an alluring rich girl from his prep school. Young, budding nymphomaniac, Wendy Hood roams the neighborhood, innocently exploring liquor cabinets and lingerie drawers of her friends' parents, looking for something new. Then an ice storm hits, the worst in a century.
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A “powerful” novel of two families and a brutal winter storm in suburban Connecticut by the award-winning author of Purple America (Newsday). A potentially devastating blizzard approaches New Canaan, Connecticut, while internal forces of desire, frustration, and ennui threaten to tear apart two quintessentially affluent, suburban families. Elena Hood rightfully suspects her husband, Benjamin, is having an affair with neighbor Janey Williams, while Benjamin resents Elena and his mounting feelings of ineptitude. As the snow begins to fall, Benjamin and Elena, as well as Janey and her husband, attend a neighborhood “key party,” where they and other respectable suburbanites agree to go home with whomever’s keys they draw from a bowl. Meanwhile, the Hoods’ and Williams’s teenage children are caught up in their own experimentations with sex and drugs as they test the boundaries of their structured upbringing. With author Rick Moody’s sharp eye for the nuances of suburban life and allusions to 1970s America from Watergate to the Fantastic Four, the novel’s landscape is vivid and immersive. This timeless, unforgettable novel is a compassionate portrayal of flawed characters and reflects Rick Moody’s sharp eye for the contradictions of suburban life. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rick Moody including rare images from the author’s personal collection.
