The Black Veil: A Memoir, by Rick Moody

Graham Caveney follows a novelist's quest for his twisted roots, and meets the tortured souls of Puritan New England

During the first decade of the 18th century, in York, Maine, a young boy called Joseph Moody accidentally shot and killed his best friend, Ebenezer Preble. Not long after, he covered his face with a handkerchief and maintained this (dis)guise until his death aged 53. Then, 120 years later, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne stumbled across this incident and transformed it into a short story called "The Minister's Veil". A century and a half further on, a man in his mid-twenties – an unpublished novelist – admits himself to a psychiatric hospital suffering from alcoholism, chronic depression and the conviction that "I was myself a transistor radio that couldn't be tuned properly; the stereo signal kept fading in and out; I couldn't hold up my end of the contract of my birth; I was going to be raped."

In this brooding, obsessive, tragi-comic memoir, the novelist Rick Moody has finally written the book he has hinted at through his career. The motifs that have haunted his fiction – the genealogy of melancholy, America's perverse legacy of Puritanism, its relish for self-con- and de-struction, the potency of family myths and memories, history taking up residence in psychic meltdown – all are exorcised in this Book of Revelations. It is the word made flesh: Moody embodying the stories of his self.

As part of his recovery (or as a symptom of illness), young Moody embarks on a monomaniacal quest to track down his ancestry. He starts with his father and their shared love of books, a passion that takes them both to Maine and the story of Handkerchief Moody. The first question is the possibility of murder. He delves into the history of American firearms, and wonders how a nine-year-old could have accidentally triggered a musket more than five feet long which required the loading of coarse-grained powder "from a large main flask".

Yet his investigations are far from parochial or pedantic. We are given tangential chapters on America's doomed love affair with weaponry and, within pages, move to analyses of high-school massacres and how the telling of these tragedies re-writes "the inevitability" of their outcome. He jump-cuts to William Burroughs' "William Tell" shooting of his wife Joan, discussing both the necessity and unreliability of eye-witness accounts.

There is a refreshing refutation of linearity; a side-stepping of the heroic fantasy of progress. As Moody warns us, "My book and my life are written in fits, more like epilepsy than like a narrative". He riffs brilliantly on the paradox that acceptance of alcoholism is the first step to its cure, but that it is a condition which (by definition) resists acknowledgement by the sufferer. With a flourish worthy of Freud, he then compares this state to being veiled from oneself. Cue a scholarly chapter on how Hawthorne's parable of the veil has been interpreted by academics.

He gives us the New Critics' veil as one of seven types of ambiguity; the psychoanalytic veil of castration; the pragmatic reading of the veil as an emblem of William James's "sick soul". Interspersed with these intellectual somersaults are memories of his time as a graduate student, a pill-popping Derrida-quoting semiotician who "had a brush with Marxism, because to say I was a Marxist-Leninist was the thing that most irritated my parents". He remembers discovering Jack Daniels and Foucault (with equal delight), all the while going slowly mad about how "the veil itself were veiled" from his critical strategies. This is as funny as it is frantic, and Moody mocks his own neuroses even as he captures their manic clarity.

The veil and his malady become metonyms for Moody the writer, statements of identity that rely upon concealment: "We need a part of us that will never be known, so that the more we reveal, the more we are enveloped in veils, layers that refuse to be known ... such that any memoir is a fiction". He adds that "many fictions are veiled memories: the two ... narrative strategies, concealing and revealing, depending upon and excluding one another by turns".

This essay-memoir-travelogue-confessional could not be further removed from the victim-lit genre of breakdown and redemption. In its playfulness, candour and ambitious asides, it owes more to the lyricism of Nabokov's Speak, Memory or the irreverent charms of Dave Eggers than to the school of earnest disclosure.

Towards the end, Moody dons a veil himself. Beneath the frailty of the cloth, he embraces the weight of its significance, "a howling inside me about history and remorse and loneliness and madness and the need to capture these, somehow".

In covering his face, he discovers the multitude of masks that we keep hidden from ourselves: a veil of fears confronted, and of lives connected.