Customer Reviews

Purple America: A Novel

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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.

Reading Rick Moody's Purple America is like spying on a dysfunctional family's bathroom, you see everything. Read this novel at your own risk, for you will experience decay and destruction with little catharsis. The writing is as well done as you could ask. The characters are well rounded and believable. My only issue with this novel is that I came to the table ill prepared to handle the depressing narration. So, read it but realize what you are in for.

... 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.

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.

Rick Moody's Purple America is a novel of suburbia, with a very '90s twist. All of the events in this book take place during one horrible evening, and include spousal abandonment, attempted euthanasia, kinky sex, drunken combat (and combative drunkenness), return home, and filial love (and duty). Despite the short time frame involved, the plot is not easy to summarize. The main character, Dexter ("Hex") Raitliffe, has returned home to care for his almost totally paralyzed (but mentally sharp) mother, Billie, who herself has been abandoned by her husband. Billie wants nothing more than to die, but her paralysis makes suicide impossible. Hence her plea to Hex to do the deed. Hex, enraged over Billie's abandonment, sets out to find (and punish?) the husband who abandoned Billie, in a night filled with peril and unexpected surprise. Moody is a daring writer. While told in the third person, each chapter assumes the point of view of a different character. Moody's sentences range from fragments to periods which would make Cicero swoon (the second sentence in the book is more than four pages long). In a lesser writer's hands, these devices would seem forced, or simply fail. Moody holds it all together, and creates a breathtaking novel. This book requires patience and careful attention, but rewards both greatly.

In following Hex Raitliffe and his distressed family through the course of one weekend, Rick Moody takes a slice of middle class suburbia and slides it, this microcosm of American society, under his magnifying glass to diagnose the ills of a decaying culture.

The story in Purple America takes place over the course of one weekend, at the beginning of which Hex Raitliffe has returned home to suburban Connecticut to care for his deteriorating mother. While Moody slips the main character trough one mishap after another, he tours the realities of a mortal family as well as a diseased society. The book at times can be disheartening to read, because Hex Raitliffe is a sympathetic main character, but Moody's diagnoses for America points to rampant toxicity, radiation, the myopic misuse of technology, pollution, nervous overconsumption, and a male preoccupation with weaponry. By the end, when the remains of Hex's mother's body, a nuclear power plant, and nearly every human relationship has broke down, the author seems to have skipped any prognosis, deemed America past decline and created an autopsy for his bruised purple nation.

Despite the sad underlying tone, this book should pull you in by the sheer force of the language. The first two sentences, describing Hex giving his invalid mother a bath, make the most powerful opening to any novel I've read. The book in many ways reproduces the promise of that first chapter. The language soars, but is used to describe the most everyday activities. The brilliantly written sex scene of Hex's awkward reunion with his high school crush is an example. One reviewer for this reason, and accurately I think, calls the book a "domestic thriller." It is about the most ordinary of guys in an ordinary family, but in duress. It was interesting to read Moody catalogue the excesses of suburban living-inside the Raitliffe manse, the "mahogany couch-with-end-tables, the carved Brunswick Craftsman-style pool table, the inlaid music cabinet with Victrola, the rosewood love seat and parlor set, the imitation British pub-style bar with Waterford crystal low and highball set, the early Magnavision monochrome television receiver, the floor-model French birdcage with stuffed parrot, and more"-listing the material possessions that the Raitliffes and others in their neighborhood have amassed.

In that sense, the book is a kind of elegy for a class. The purple of America and the purple that Billie Raitliffe longs to surround herself with is the classic purple of royalty, but Hex's family-his ill mother and skipped-town step father-never meet their "ideal of rural paradise." Instead, words come easily to no one; communication within the family is stilted; Billie, the mother, resignedly talks through a computer; Hex stutters uncontrollably, and it seems they have just as little fluidity of access to their emotions. Billie wants someone to end her suffering. Her second husband, Lou, goes AWOL when he gets bored caring for a woman who doesn't want to live and her son balks at the possibility of euthanasia, choosing instead to stuff his face with a cheeseburger. Hex's sense of duty toward and simultaneous flight from the responsibilities of home create much of the tug and pull throughout the remainder of the book. And in Rick Moody's hands, it is a worthwhile, if not always upbeat, weekend to spend with the Raitliffes.

Certain metaphors ought to come with expiration dates, no less than milk or medicine. Rick Moody's third novel, "Purple America," is an ambitious, funny, beautifully written book whose prevailing metaphor -- the faltering promise of the nuclear age, and behind it the decline of the American nuclear family -- has begun to curdle. The military and civilian uses of atomic physics have been with us for only half a century, but somehow their fictional uses, irresistible over the years to numberless writers and filmmakers, already seem as inert as a spent fuel rod. This subtle handicap never keeps "Purple America" from succeeding as an uncommonly empathetic fugue of voices from what's left of the Raitliffe family of Fenwick, Connecticut, during one night in 1992. The novel starts with awkward, stammering, prematurely middle-aged Hex Raitliffe (christened Dexter but lefthanded) fumblingly bathing his paralyzed, vaguely senile mother, Billie, in the upstairs bathroom of their once-stylish home. "If he's a hero," Moody writes with grace and compassion of Hex, "then heroes are five-and-dime, and the world is as crowded with them as it is with stray pets, worn tires, and missing keys." For the second chapter, perspective shifts to Billie. In a pattern repeated throughout the book, we at first resist such a wrench, having spent the previous pages inhabiting Hex's mind with an intimacy only very fine writing can create. But before long we are Billie's, and the subsequent sidesteps into Billie's overwhelmed second husband Lou's company, or that of Hex's unforgotten ninth-grade love, Jane, are just as wrenching. We're sorry to leave each one of them, even as the next one waits. Reading "Purple America" can feel like dancing a quadrille with four very different partners. On we go, propelled from consciousness to consciousness by Moody's prodigious gift for ventriloquism and large, supple vocabulary, readjusting to each point of view before trading it back for another. Along the way Billie asks Hex for his promise to help end her life, and Lou troubleshoots a crisis at the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant, where he works. The action of the book obeys the unities, taking place over a single night on Long Island Sound, but this doesn't keep Moody from flashing back twice to the letters of Hex's late father, who worked on the Manhattan Project in what seemed the golden age of atomic experimentation, long before it became such a Millstone around the national neck. These brief interludes hold the key to "Purple America's" portentous title, in which the colors of an atomic blast -- and of Billie's favored household decorating accent -- combine to suggest an America where purple now connotes garishness and violence, instead of the regal confidence it once did. The climax avoids sentimentality, perhaps even more rigorously than an emotionally invested reader might wish. Connecticut character studies and nuclear questions aren't incompatible, as John Cheever showed in the classic short story "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow," where an upper-middle-class man building a backyard bomb shelter ultimately confronts the possibility that he wants the world to end. But in "Purple America" the cosmic stakes feel just slightly extrinsic, an overlay, estranged from the urgency of the story. Occasionally mistrusting his considerable powers, Moody's like the off-duty cop who uses his siren to get home even when he's got the turnpike all to himself.

There are a number of valid complaints to make about the rigmarole that characterizes Rick Moody's distinctive type of writing - it's long-winded, it's morose, it's prone to sometimes arbitrary shifts into italics. Yet after finishing Purple America in record time, I realize that Moody's baroque and intricate hyperacute sense of detail and syntax (its 298 pages cover barely 12 hours) allows for an incredibly close understanding of his characters' consciousness, and leads to an experience of such precise sensory understanding, it transcends simple ideas of setting and location - it fully and specifically inhabits a life. It also, amongst all the Moody works I've read, renders his love of italics in the clearest light - each phrase hammering home the notion of phrases and words repeated in public consciousness, rendering the way voices, echoes, and ideas become essential in the formation of thoughts, emotions, and identity. Purple America seems destined for a few possible outcomes, and for a while you feel yourself inching closer to them, only to be thwarted, leaving certain threads dangling - a choice frustrating to be certain, but in the most rewarding way - you'll be left to agonize over Moody's precision of ideas and circumstances, tiny details leading to any number of enormous everyday outcomes. His final image of Hex Raitliffe is far from conclusive, but it is unshakeable, a precarious desperation given vivid charge and dimension.

The chronicle of the last days of a (literally) nuclear family-- _Purple America_ begins when Hex, the stuttering alcoholic son of the house, returns to find that his wheelchair-bound mother Billie has been abandoned by her second husband. Hex is left to sort out which of the family responsibilities (including a shocking request from his mother) he is both willing and able to take.

The story is told in a shifting array of voices which carry the language and perspective of all the characters. Symbolism is the order of the day, with both of Billie's husbands having nuclear pasts and the varying shades of purple being used to create a thematic unity. The quality of the writing is difficult to debate-- at points where I had lost some interest in the story I found my attention carried by the craftsmanship involved in the language itself.

There were times where I felt as though Moody didn't realize how strong of a story he had created (the mixed horror and pleasure with which Hex must tend his mother's useless body) and relied on the more symbolic elements at points where that reliance was useless and even distracting. The ending is often criticized, and I think that the criticism comes from that fact that while the ending functions very well on the symbolic level, it's less fulfilling in terms of the story. Instead of finally being drawn into Hex or Billie, the spectacular surrealism of the final pages had more the effect of putting me at a distance- perhaps exactly what was intended.

While the narrative events in Purple America may take place in less than a day, the past weighs heavily on the characters and sometimes turns the narrative in on itself. Author Rick Moody shifts among the streams of consciousness of about a dozen different characters, focusing on four of them: Hex Raitliffe, his mother Billie Raitliffe, her husband Lou Sloane and Jane Ingersoll, an old schoolmate of Hex's. Moody imbues every paragraph with layers of details of each character's thoughts and the environment (temporal as well as spatial) each character inhabits. The inner life and outer reality of each character coalesces to form a unique setting for each character.

Hex's existence is bounded by an alcoholic haze of rationalization. Hex may have been ignoring his mother for years, but now that he was taking care of her, he believed he was redeeming himself.

Billie Raitliffe's life is extremely frustrated. She's essentially helpless, close to speechless and her husband has just walked out on her. However, her intelligence and memories of her life are both intact: "She had been a talker. She had been able to put the awkward at ease; she had been able to comfort children; she had been able to sweet-talk truculent shopkeepers. But her voice was gone, was consigned to the netherworld of widowed socks and earrings." However, based on what little you have seen so far, you have to ask yourself if Billie was not guilty of major rationalization about her ability to "put the awkward at ease...[and]...comfort children." Her own adult child Hex is the most ill at ease person in the novel, and, ironically, stutters badly, which makes any communication with his mother very hard.

Of the main characters, Lou Sloane is the most "normal." His environment is not limited to a dying body in an aging house or to an alcohol-addled stumble through life. He contemplates travel, how southern New England connects, and how his soon-to-be-former employer Millstone Nuclear Power Station interacts with the environment. While a little more future-focused than Billie or Hex, he is frequently ruminating on historical issues while thinking about his incipient retirement: ...the Boston Post Road, the oldest road in the country, relic of the colonies, stretching from New York up to Boston and then beyond, winding through the state of Maine, along that rocky coast and through the North Woods, through logging country, before vanishing into the Canadian hinterlands. The Boston Post Road-which antedated the federal monopoly-hotfooted it through the Indian turf, delivering it to the Pilgrims. Moody's characters are constantly "digressing," but almost all of the digressions integrate real information about life in post World War II Connecticut.

The one main character who seems to live the most in the "here and now" is Jane Ingersol. A bored divorcee, she meets her old schoolmate Hex as he tries to take Billie out to dinner. She tries to help Billie and she tries to help Hex, but is not successful in any case; Billie almost drowns, Hex's car blows up and he has sexual difficulties with Jane.

The narrative winds back on itself around issues of environment, self-determination, and ghosts from the past.