Impressions

Phrase Book - Rick Moody

What a wonderfully confusing, trippy, helpless, depressing story. It's Lucy's story. Or is it? It's many of Lucy's stories. It's what the narrator thinks are Lucy's stories. It's what we think the narrator thinks are Lucy's stories. It's what we think the narrator thinks are stories that Lucy thinks are her's. You see, Lucy took 70 hits of acid in one day and "lived to tell". I think the story that we read is about possibilities, it is about the unrealiability of the narrator. But in the end, it is about the degenerate state that the human mind and its modifications (which is life) is capable of reaching. It is about a sense of utter hopelessness and helplessness of losing one's mind - in the true sense of the phrase.

Parts of the piece are written in an almost stream-of-consciousness manner. Clearly, the point of view here, is the mind itself. Maybe the mind of the narrator or that of Lucy -- it almost doesn't matter. The effect it creates is that of loosely connected stories and confusions (of memory, of imagination?) and of an existential look at life.