the available music of language, characters finally as sonic events who inhabit a geography of print." Esquire describes Moody as "that rare writer who can make the language do tricks and still suffuse his narrative with soul." Lydia Millet, in a 2001 article for The Village Voice, described Moody as "equipped with subtle but powerful typographic tools—the vibrant and pervasive Bernhardian italic phrase, pregnant with meaning, the elegant Joycean em dash denoting dialogue—Moody strikes me as a self-styled avenging angel of highbrow literary cool. Underneath the Clark Kentish exterior lurks a crypto-Superman schooled in semiotics and steeped in pop culture, one eyebrow permanently raised at the unsightly stupidity of the masses." Janet Burroway, in a 2001 article for The New York Times, wrote that Moody "has been compared to John Cheever, with ample justification. He has the same knockabout whimsy careering into keen lament. But Mr. Moody's work has a distinctive rawness; it's more steeped in rage. He's also funnier, and to that degree less reconciled to the world as he finds it. Cheever had less to forgive; the waterfall of language here is full of toxic sludge. Perhaps this is only to say that John Cheever belonged to midcentury, while Rick Moody is a chronicler of the middle class for the millennium." His most recent novel, 2015's Hotels of North America, received widespread critical praise. Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times that "this is Mr. Moody’s best novel in many years. It’s a little book, a bagatelle, but it’s a little book of irony and wit and heartbreak. It is insightful on topics like the joy of stockpiling hotel hair-care products while also asking the big questions, such as, “Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a fetal ball.". Hotels of North America was described by the Washington Post as "formally daring, often very funny and surprisingly moving. It should earn Moody new fans from a millennial cohort that was still in diapers back when he was basking in his early critical acclaim." Criticism Novelist and critic Dale Peck unfavorably reviewed Moody's The Black Veil in The New Republic, a review so harsh it has become infamous in literary circles. Peck began the review with the sentence "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation," arguing that Moody's writing is "pretentious, muddled, derivative, [and] bathetic."