“This Wild Communion with Air and Snow and Silence” : Suburban Nature in Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm

Abstract

Throughout the 20th century, suburbanization drastically changed the American landscape. In this thesis I examine the environmental ramifications of this phenomenon as they are explored in American author Rick Moody’s second novel The Ice Storm (1994). This work focuses on the way the novel combines the conventions of American suburban fiction and the apocalyptic tradition to draw attention to the paradoxicality of suburban nature, and this paradoxicality’s further role in generating the suburban anxiety at the core of the novel.

The Ice Storm tells the story of the Hoods, an affluent upper-middle-class family of four, whose suburban hometown of New Canaan gets caught in a devastating winter storm in November 1973. A typical American suburban narrative, the novel draws its conflict from the juxtaposition of the polished suburban façade and the anxieties hidden behind it, as it follows the family’s escalating inner turmoil for the 24 hours the storm ravages their neighborhood. While the novel explores many typical sources for suburban misery from financial agony to the overall pressures of conformity, by imposing on the suburbanites the threat of both a destructive winter storm and the energy crisis of 1973 Moody goes on to connect this anxiety to both the suburbanites’ disconnect from the natural world as well as the overall unsustainability of the suburban form.

By exploring suburban history, literary conventions and the essence of suburban nature, I showcase the way Moody’s otherwise typical story of a suburban apocalypse also reads as an acerbic, environmentally conscious critique of the suburban sprawl, one that is also concerningly topical nearly 30 years after its publication. With this thesis I hope to contribute to building a further understanding of suburban fiction’s relevance within the ecocritical framework.