In the spa town of Saratoga Springs, a few hours' drive from New York City, the natives are staring. Rick Moody, one of America's hottest young authors, thinks it's because he's wearing a veil, a little black number he ran up himself with fabric from a local store.
"They think I'm either a Muslim fundamentalist or a cross-dresser," he says, embarrassed. "It's bad, either way you look at it." Maybe Moody's right. Maybe the unwanted attention is all down to the yashmak he's wearing as research for a book about "Handkerchief" Moody, an ancestor who killed a boy and donned the gauze as penance. But it's equally possible that Saratoga Springs is fascinated by what goes on behind Moody's eyes.
This shaggy-haired 36-year-old has become one of the most talked-about figures in American literature, thanks to The Ice Storm (recently released as a film here) and Purple America, a remarkable novel acclaimed as Book of 1997 by both the New York Times and New York Post. His dissection of the decadent middle classes has brought sobriquets like "the new John Updike" or "the new Philip Roth". New York magazine describes him as "the pre-eminent chronicler of suburbia's decay"; but with themes like wife-swapping, alcoholism and euthanasia, his work stirs up strong feelings.
Take The Ice Storm, which one reviewer called "one of the wittiest books about family life ever written". In a laid-back, way-out, groovy style with echoes of The History Man, it tells the story of two affluent Connecticut families, the Hoods and the Williamses, and the crises that afflict the menopausal parents and pubescent offspring in the winter of 1973. It makes bitter fun of the 1970s fad for self-improvement and personal growth, and casts a bleary eye on the decade's free-and-easy attitude to booze. It drags up wince-making details from the decade that style forgot. But above all, it layers on the dodgy sex - unconventional, illicit or just plain bad.
The great set piece of The Ice Storm is a "key party", a bash where the side-burned husbands drop their car keys in a salad bowl and the harem-panted wives do a lucky dip to see who they'll go home with. Either side of this scene - to pick a few incidents at random - Benjamin Hood has a loveless, joyless poke with a girl called Melody in the back of his Karmann-Ghia, Jim Williams screws Ben's wife Elena in the front of his Cadillac for "less time than it takes to defrost a windshield", Ben and Elena's 14-year-old daughter two-times her boyfriend with his prepubescent younger brother, and her sibling soaks his penis in milk "in an effort to get his housemaster's cat to have congress with him".
The Ice Storm had a particular impact in one part of middle America - New Canaan, the well-off WASP enclave where Moody set the novel, and where the author spent three years of his life. "I had no idea if there really were key parties in New Canaan," he says, "but all of a sudden there were all these arguments about which schoolmistress had them." There's just one sex scene in Purple America - again set among Connecticut's WASPs - but it's stronger and stranger yet. The romance begins as a woman helps a man catheterise his disabled mother, continues many beers later in a room full of medical equipment, and reaches a climax with the woman tied face-down to the bed and the man masturbating on to her back.
When he apologises - "I'm ashamed. . . I'm so sorry I subjected you t-t-t-t-o that" - she replies, "It's no big deal. It was theoretically interesting." This may not be most people's idea of a first date, but Moody - single and "a practising heterosexual" - readily admits that he's drawn to unconventional or flawed sex. "Language focused on stuff that we're disinclined to talk about always has a tremendous energy," he explains, as the interstate hums away to itself in the distance. "I like to read about other people's attitudes to sexuality, especially when they're deviants. So I've just been proceeding down the line of what interests me as a reader. Maybe one day I'll get tired of that and get on to the missionary position."
Moody's latest novel, Purple America, revolves around the modern-day characters of Billie Raitliffe, a 70-year-old woman wasting away from a neurological disease, her alcoholic son Hex, whom she begs to kill her, and her husband Lou, who has run out on Billie because he can't face the fact that she wants to die. It's a beautiful, moving book, and Moody's portrayal of the failing, paralysed heroine is almost unbearable.
More than most people, Moody feels he has to address this subject. For a start, he's worried about his own old age - "we have quite a bit of Alzheimer's disease on my father's side of the family" - and then there's his mother, in her early 60s, as strong as a horse but already worrying about how she will end her days. "She's a really strong advocate of the Hemlock Society," he says, referring to a pro-euthanasia organisation. "I'd see her at Christmas and she'd tell me how she was stockpiling this drug and then that drug, and finally I said to her, `Look, I'm happy that you're happy but I really don't want to keep talking about this'. I think that was why I started the book."
Purple America gives a sensitive treatment to an explosive subject. Moody refuses to either endorse or refute Billie's death wish, or to simplify the dilemma faced by her nearest and dearest. But he still has had trouble with the zealots. Even in the homeland of Doctor Death, there are problems just raising such a topic.
"There's a kind of hush about euthanasia," he says. "There's this whole fundamentalist stranglehold on the debate where it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong to want to take your own life." But breaking taboos seems to become a habit. Earlier, Moody had explained why alcoholism looms so large in his books - why Ben Hood is never without his flask of spirits, why Hex Raitliffe is only happy with a beer in his hand and five more in the fridge. "It's to do with being drawn towards things people don't want you to talk about," he said. "That's where literature gets its energy - in things that are suppressed."
Purple America is published this month by Flamingo. The Ice Storm is published by Abacus