While readers who share both Rick Moody's last name and his fetish for genealogy might get a kick out of The Black Veil, the self-styled "memoir with digressions" fails to transcend Moody's pet obsessions—though not for lack of trying. Rightfully self-conscious about writing a memoir at the ripe age of 39, the three-time novelist sets his life story against a backdrop of colonial America and the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. One of Moody's distant relatives, Joseph "Handkerchief" Moody, reportedly inspired Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil," a short story about a guilt-ridden reverend who hides his face in shame. A neat but bloated framing device, the Hawthorne link lures Moody into a spell of historical sleuthing, as he attempts to unearth the root of his tattered young adulthood. The book starts with Moody's upbringing in Connecticut, the setting for his novel The Ice Storm, and progresses through parental divorce, semiotics study at Brown University, bad post-grad jobs in San Francisco, and subsequent years of wandering and alcoholism in New Jersey. The details of Moody's life are left somewhat vague, as they're ultimately employed as a meditation on a brooding family lineage—a meditation that gets stretched to outrageous conclusions. "To be an American, to be a citizen of the West, is to be a murderer," Moody writes, ostensibly tying his troubled disposition to the wrongdoings of half of the planet. That doesn't sound nearly so ridiculous in context, but the statement showcases the fundamental flaw in a book that lacks both the personal affect and the universal viability that make good memoirs work. Dominated by fire-and-brimstone preachers and a long list of luggish, tragic figures, the Moody family history shadows the rise of America better than most. But The Black Veil's cumbersome research and florid, distractingly italicized prose seem underserved by Moody's plight. Passages about his ambiguous nervous breakdown, and his search through New England for clues to his family's mythology, prove tenderly engaging, but most of the book plays like a one-sided conversation between a writer and his specific backstory. In a strange paradox, however, the author lacks the narcissistic urge to give The Black Veil much of a lived-in impact. Moody ends the book with his misgivings about writing a memoir, musing on the commonality allegedly embedded in his tale. But while The Black Veil marks a valiant effort to write a selfless memoir, looking outward doesn't do much good when everything falls out of focus.