Dazzling, a tremendous accomplishment

books:


	• Purple America: A Novel Rick Moody Back Bay Books, 1998 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 40 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Dazzling, a tremendous accomplishment

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.

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Boo

Moody's novel, Purple America bored me. There is a sure reason for the low price.
Yes, his character's are dysfunctional. Yes, they bleed strange characteristics,but i wasn't entertained. I give it three stars because Moody's reoccuring mood resembled a tainted Palahniuk novel. I wouldn't reccommend this novel and don't plan on reading anything else written by Moody, as harsh as it sounds.

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Wasp Death

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Purple America begins in a bathtub and ends in Long Island Sound. Inbetween, 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 isdying by inches of a neurological disease that will rob her of motion, of speech, andfinally of thought. Billie's second husband has left her--a fact that Hex is unaware of untilhe 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. PurpleAmerica takes place over the course of a single night; in that night,Hex gives hismother a bath, reconnects with an old love, gets drunk, and goes after his stepfather toconfront 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 hisstepfather works. What lifts this novel above its rather depressing subject matter isMoody's unsentimental storytelling and the soaring language with which he gives hischaracters voice. Purple America is by turns lyrical,tragic, ferocious, and funny,and Rick Moody is a writer with a brilliant future ahead of him.

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