Purple America

by Rick Moody

Overview

On the occasion of the paperback release of Demonology, Back Bay Books takes pleasure in making all four of Rick Moody's acclaimed earlier works of fiction available in handsome new paperback editions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316559775
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	05/04/1998
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

Rick Moody (1961) is an American author of novels and short stories best known for his 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two families over one long holiday weekend. An instant bestseller, it was later adapted into a film of the same name. His first book Garden State was published in 1992. His later works include The Diviners and The Four Fingers of Death. In 1999 he was designated by The New Yorker as one of 20 Writers for the 21st Century.

Hometown:

New York, NY

Date of Birth:

October 18, 1961

Education:

B.A., Brown University, 1983; M.F.A., Columbia University, 1986

Reading Group Guide

1. Despite Hex's obvious failures, he is not entirely unlikable. What are the qualities about him that make him a sympathetic character? What clues about his childhood explain how he became the man he is? What about him is Jane Ingersoll attracted to?

2. Hex stutters out his words, at times almost incomprehensibly. Billie cannot speak without the electronic device. Louis and Allen communicate their most important thoughts in letters. What do you think Rick Moody is saying about communication today, about the way people discuss their feelings and emotions?

3. Louis Raitliffe leaves his wife Billie at a time in her life when she is most dependent on him. Is there any justification for his abandonment? Is there ever a time when a husband or wife can say, "I just can't take it any more. I have to live my own life"?

4. In addition to the nuclear power plant, what is leaking in Purple America? What is the significance of the leaking? How does it tie the Raitliffe family and plant together? How does the plant figure in the story?

5. What influence do Denny and Chris, the beatnik contractors who renovate the Raitliffes' house (chapter 11), have on Hex? Why is Hex especially susceptible to their influence? Have you ever had a similar experience -- that is, has a person you have known only fleetingly left an indelible impression on you or otherwise altered the course of your life?

6. Every couple's first sexual encounter has its awkward moments. What's unusual about Hex and Jane's first encounter (chapter 18)? Why do you think Jane whispers to herself things are pretty good when the coupling is over?

7. The color purple figures prominently throughout the book. What is the significance of it? How does Rick Moody use the different shades of purple -- e.g. lilac, royal purple, lavender -- to describe moods and feelings. Do you think this is an effective writing tool?

8. The relationship between Billie and Hex Raitliffe -- a mother and her son -- is at the heart of Purple America. But much of what happens in the novel relates directly to Hex's feelings about his father, Allen, and his stepfather, Louis. How do Hex's emotions and attitudes toward these two men evolve throughout the course of the novel? How is Hex himself changed by this evolution in attitude?

9. Hex saves his mother's life by getting her to the hospital and helps her die as soon as they return home. What changes his mind? Discuss the conflicting emotions that go through his mind on page 279.

10. Is the last chapter of Purple America -- Allen's letter to Billie -- tragic or hopeful? Does it make you feel sorry for Billie or relieved that she had some happiness in her life, someone who seemed truly to love her?

Editorial Reviews

Certain metaphors ought to come with expiration dates, just like 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 with 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 emerging from what's left of the Raitliffe family of Fenwick, Conn., during one night in 1992. The novel starts with awkward, stammering, prematurely middle-aged Hex Raitliffe bathing his paralyzed, vaguely senile mother, Billie, in the upstairs bathroom of her once-stylish home. "If he's a hero," Moody writes 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." In the second chapter, the point of view shifts to Billie. This pattern repeats throughout the book. At first we resist such a wrench, having spent the previous pages inhabiting Hex's mind with the 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 mind, or that of Hex's unforgotten ninth-grade love, Jane, are just as wrenching.

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. Along the way, Billie asks Hex to 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 Artistotle's 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.

Connecticut character studies and nuclear questions aren't incompatible subjects, as John Cheever showed in the classic short story "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow," in which an upper-middle-class man building a backyard bomb shelter ultimately confronts the possibility that he just might want 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. -- Salon

David Kipen

Ambitious, stylistically dazzling and heartfelt, this fourth novel from a Pushcart Prize winner (Garden State) chronicles the meltdown in a single evening of a well-to-do Connecticut family. Dexter "Hex" Raitliffe-middle-aged, stuttering, alcoholic-returns home to care for his ailing mother, Billie. Suffering from a degenerative disease, Billie has lost her mobility, her speech-and her hope. So exhausted is her second husband, Lou (manager at a crumbling nuclear power plant beset with problems of its own), that he reluctantly abandons her. Their lives come to crisis poignantly and violently in one night; Moody's dense prose evokes their "dance of feelings" in their disparate voices. Tenderness and guilt war in Lou's mind even as we understand Hex's conviction that his stepfather, who callously left his farewell to his wife typed out on her voice synthesizer, is monstrous and selfish. Hex's own struggles against self-abasement and denial and Billie's rage at her illness are also powerfully rendered in urgent, intense stream-of-consciousness. The novel catalogues the detritus that fills their thoughts; fragments of the technical jargon of nuclear power and of neurological medicine; the features on the face of coastal Connecticut; Billie's obsession with lavender. That linguistic play is dazzling-so much so that it sometimes overshadows the drama it is meant to serve (as in an episode in which Billie finds herself neglected at the restaurant where she and Hex were to dine). It serves less ably the various secondary characters. But the specificity and nuance of the voices of Hex, Billie and Lou drive the story towards a climax that is grotesque, inexorable and deeply sad.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Moody's sentences travel great distances; they knock the breath out of you. So does Purple America.

Mirabella

You come up gasping on the last page.

Details

Moody returns to the site of his previous novel (The Ice Storm, 1994), the Gothic underside of Connecticut's privileged suburbs, and once again finds despair, half-suppressed fears, and a pervasive anger.

At the heart of the narrative is Dexter Raitliffe (appropriately, given his ill-starred attempts at life, nicknamed "Hex"), a disaffected boomer summoned home when his despairing stepfather abandons Hex's increasingly ill mother. Once a great beauty, she is now confined to a wheelchair, incontinent, entirely dependent on others. Money isn't the problem; Hex's father, who died in 1963, had amassed a fortune in a manner he had been careful to conceal. Hex, who works sporadically in public relations, is drifting, waiting for something to happen. His mother, terrified of descending into a long twilit death, makes him promise to kill her when her decline becomes final. Lou Sloane, Hex's stepfather, hovers in the background, debating whether or not to go back home while Hex, reluctant to stay, does so, fighting unsuccessfully to repress recollections of a painful childhood. He drinks, indulges in a halting romance, and quietly comes apart. The plot is unsurprising, but Moody's relentlessly original voice rings new changes on it, weaving together a medley of voices (Hex, his mother, Lou) believably, desperately raking over the events of their lives in an attempt to find out how things have gone so wrong. The language has a jazzy punch and freshness, flawlessly catching the ebb and flow of thought and the way in which fear adds an edge of frenzy to even the smallest events. The sad climax is predictable, yet is nonetheless powerful and moving.

A few scenes go on too long, and some of the ruminations could have been trimmed, but these minor matters don't disguise the fact that a very talented writer is beginning to hit his stride, working out a highly original language to illuminate the quiet terrors of suburban life.

Kirkus Reviews