The tony suburban setting is crucial to where the characters are at the start of the book and where they end up after the events of the day (and night). But the setting is as much a character as the characters who people that setting - New Canaan, Connecticut, on Thanksgiving, 1973. They are interesting but they are too damaged and dysfunctional to relate to.

The human characters are not exactly charismatic, not likable in any sense. My favorite character in The Ice Storm is 1973. That the narration is good helps, of course, but what I'm really referring to is the author's narrative voice, especially as he shifts his perspective among the four Hood family members and occasionally throws in his own personal musings. When I had a chance to get the audio edition, I thought it might be a better listen than a read, and that proved to be true. Just 30-40 pages in, I lost the book, and I did not rush out to replace it. I had originally tried reading the book in print but had difficulty getting into it. The narrative voice, paraphrasing what its characters are saying and thinking rather than quoting them directly via dialogue, makes it quite a good listen. And the central tragedy of his tale remains resonant, though his decrying of our cultural wasteland seems a bit stale.Some things work in audio, some don't. His depiction of these families, however, is insightful and convincing, penetrating the thoughts and fears of each individual. Unfortunately, Moody, winner of the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award for his first novel, Garden State, tends to use these details in a more encyclopedic than evocative manner. Pop-cultural references of the time, from Hush Puppies to the film Billy Jack, pervade the text. A neighborhood ``key party,'' at which couples exchange mates by drawing keys out of a bowl, brings the action to a chaotic climax as an apocalyptic winter storm culminates in physical tragedy to match the emotional damage in the small community. Meanwhile, the adolescent children of both families experiment with sex, alcohol and drugs to find identities and to overcome a ponderous sense of alienation. Benjamin Hood, plagued by a loss of importance at work and a growing drinking problem, pursues an ill-fated affair with Janey Williams his wife, Elena, feels herself losing what little regard she has left for him. The affluent WASP community of New Canaan, Conn., is home to the Hood and Williams families, neighboring two-parent, two-child households built around increasingly dysfunctional marriages. Exhaustive detailing of early 1970s popular/consumer culture in suburban New England provides the context for this archetypal tale of the American nuclear family in decline.

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody