BOOKS: Wasp Sex '73

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The purveyors of popular culture have turned the 1970s into the decade of the moment. Fashion has reprised platform shoes, Pumas and bell-bottoms. Movies, TV shows and magazines marketed to the children of those taste-free years revel in their endless allusions to the Bradys and the Partridges.

More than any one character, it is the decade of the '70s itself that serves as the focus of Rick Moody's deft second novel, The Ice Storm (Little, Brown; 279 pages; $19.95). The story of the Hood family is set in 1973, by which time, as Moody writes, "the Summer of Love had migrated, in its drug- resistant strain, to the Connecticut suburbs five years after its initial introduction." In this new era of shag carpets and social upheaval, the Hoods and other New Canaan families have exchanged Chippendale propriety for Naugahyde and wife swapping.

The Hoods are a troubled lot. Father Benjamin is a securities analyst always drunk, always cheating. His wife Elena is too obsessed with herself, the I Ching and the writings of Masters and Johnson to offer the teenage Paul and Wendy any semblance of stability. In turn, the children, pained and neglected, seek comfort in Seconal and promiscuity.

While the problems of the Hoods are unrelenting, Moody recounts them with a detachment that sets the novel apart from those darker chronicles of New England suburban misery, the works of John Cheever and Richard Yates. Moody is a stylishly clever writer, but by making one too many references to Match Game and eight-track tapes, he undercuts the struggle and pathos of his characters. Nevertheless, we sense that somewhere today in New York or Los Angeles or Washington, mid-thirtyish Paul and Wendy are paying big therapy bills.