Product Description

From the author of "The Ice Storm" comes the story of one weekend in the life of a New York publicist--a young man with a stutter, a terminally ill mother, and a drinking problem--who is summoned home to suburban Connecticut, only to find himself confronted by obstacles of comically epic proportions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #759549 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.com Review
Purple America begins in a bathtub and ends in Long Island Sound. In between, Rick Moody's latest novel explores the landscape of a family in crisis. Dexter (Hex) Raitliffe, a freelance publicist, returns home to care for his mother, Billie, who is dying by inches of a neurological disease that will rob her of motion, of speech, and finally of thought. Billie's second husband has left her--a fact that Hex is unaware of until he comes home--and her only hope for assisted suicide lies in her son. Unfortunately, Hex is barely able to conduct his own life, much less take his mother's. Purple America takes place over the course of a single night; in that night, Hex gives his mother a bath, reconnects with an old love, gets drunk, and goes after his stepfather to confront him, with tragic results.

As Moody weaves his tale of this fateful Friday evening, he juxtaposes themes of aging, obsolescence, and physical decline with an accident at the nuclear power plant where his stepfather works. What lifts this novel above its rather depressing subject matter is Moody's unsentimental storytelling and the soaring language with which he gives his characters voice. Purple America is by turns lyrical, tragic, ferocious, and funny, and Rick Moody is a writer with a brilliant future ahead of him.

From Library Journal
The explosive cleavage of the atom and its attendant fallout provide the arch-metaphor for Moody's third novel. Billie Raitliffe, of Fenwick, Connecticut, suffers from a paralyzing neuralgic disorder and cannot care for herself. Younger husband Lou Sloane, a nuclear plant manager, has moved out, so she calls on her middle-aged, alcoholic son Dexter (Hex). The specter of Hex's father, a Manhattan Project scientist who died of radiation poisoning, hovers perceptibly over the proceedings. In a 36-hour span, Billie is injured, Hex consummates a lingering high school crush in a bizarre fashion, and Lou presides over a nuclear emergency the day of his forced early retirement. The events do not occur discretely but are part of a chain reaction Moody engineers in an atomic experiment. He renders his findings in vivid, intense, and often unpleasant detail, effectively reviving the nuclear threat and limning its symbolic and etymological resonance with domestic breakdown (half-life, decay) without denying the humanity of the characters or the centrality of the story. Despite the occasionally overwrought prose, Moody has redrawn the suburban landscape, as defined by Updike and Cheever. Fans of both will want to discover this new country.?Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Moody tackles many dark themes here involving the pollution of the body, spirit, and environment, but he does so in prose that is so powerful and moving that reading his novel becomes a transfixing rather than a depressing experience. Melancholy alcoholic Hex Raitliffe has been summoned home by his invalid mother, Billie, the victim of a raging neurological disorder that has left her body paralyzed and her speech garbled. She has been abandoned by her second husband, Lou Sloane, the manager of a nuclear power plant. Lou has left Billie, not because she daily faces some grave new insult to her health, but because he cannot bear the fact that she has given up all hope. Hex, a trust-fund baby and a neglectful son, struggles mightily, if ineffectually, to rise to the challenge of caring for his mother and to talk her out of her request for help in killing herself. Over the course of an incendiary weekend, he works himself into a drunken fever, picks up a woman he used to have a crush on, confronts his stepfather, and, finally, disastrously, attempts to fulfill his mother's request. Closely interknitting his narrative with the lyrical, soaring monologues of all the key players, Moody effortlessly moves from one striking passage to the next. Although he takes his material straight from the blaring headlines (mercy killing, nuclear spillage), it's the characters' voices, so full of urgency and distress, that are unforgettable. Joanne Wilkinson

Customer Reviews

Well-crafted, deliberate prose
Moody's prose reminds me more of old-timers like Updike, Steinbeck, and Salinger, than of his contemporaries. Why? Well, first of all, it's rich, layered, carefully plotted, crafted with care. Moody is patient; he's not worried about rushing to the end of a sentence, paragraph, or chapter just so he can execute a clever postmodern sleight-of-hand. He's more concerned with the process, the care that goes into describing a suburban backyard on an autumn night, or a crowded seafood restaurant. Postmodern prose jockeys who get off on wordplay, thwarted expectations, and other narratological trap doors might be disappointed with Moody. But I'd like to see more writers doing what Moody does: blending the best of the new and the best of the old.

Purple America is a shift away from the realm of most postmodern prose: hyper and seemingy directionless narratives, cultural subversion, deconstruction of character and narrative. As I see it, Moody shares only the best devices of his postmodern peers. Like them, he is a young writer bred on the postmodern literary climate, who knows hardly anything else. But he also realizes the worth of comparatively "conventional" twentieth-century forms as explored by writers like Salinger and his ilk. In Purple America, I feel he has blended the best of both almost seamlessly. He admits that it's still all right to write a story with no disorienting chronological jump cuts. It's all right to write a story where characters' life histories are fully divulged, from birth to death. It's all right to write a story where a terminally ambivalent man is worried sick about his dying mother.

The postmodern gestures are still there, but they don't ruin the novel because they don't obscure the narrative. They exist only in service to the telling of a compassionate and well-rounded story. Moody's writing is very deliberate: Every word is there for a reason. Puns and various double meanings don't just happen-you can tell he's not being glib; they're not just insouciant tricks, they are devices enriching their context, the story. Even during excruciating and emotionally difficult passages such as the introductory scene in which Hex bathes his mother, I welcomed Moody's drawn out and meticulous descriptive technique. He cares about the reader's total apprehension of and identification with a given event in the novel. Like Hex, Moody is a quiet, obsequious provider-eager to be of service to his audience.

I think some people miss the point on this one...
... the language is tricky at times, and he likes to get into those categorical lists, which may come across as tangential wandering, but to me its quite brilliant. The first five or so pages count as probably among the best writing I have ever read. Very meditative, like an incantation, a style which resonates throughout the book. I guess the only reason I'm writing this review is becasue this book needs to be read and studied; not enough people recognize its beauty. It's easy to read it quickly and not let it get to you. Read it slowly. A great improvement over Garden State, I think, and just as if not more satsifying than The Ice Storm. Please read it.

Dark? Sure, but also compassionate and full of heart.
Moody took on a huge challenge in building a book around a character without any obvious appeal and in a dark milieu. He manages the challenge brilliantly and has written one of the best novels I've read in years. I noticed another customer questioned the comparison to Cheever that some reveiwers have made. I think it is a very apt comparison, to all of Cheever's work, but especially to FALCONER.