Purple America: A Novel - Softcover

Moody, Rick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316559776 ISBN 13: 9780316559775

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 1998

Synopsis

"Purple America" brings us a family in extremis: a son is summoned home to care for his mother, who has long been sick, after she is abandoned by her husband. Over the course of a single weekend night, the son, Hex Raitliffe, sees his good intentions annihilated by a phalanx of opposing forces - not least of them his own predilection for strong drink. Hex confronts his stepfather, stirs up the heat of an old attraction, and tries to accommodate his mother's demands. What begins as a mission of mercy leads, one fatal step after another, to confusion, debauchery, old wounds reopened, and the stinging revelations that only a visit home can bring. The story arrives in the voices of Hex, his mother, his stepfather, and others whose paths they cross this night. Through their thoughts and their memories we see also, amazingly, a portrait of the family in its heyday: the joy of new love, the innocence of young families, and the optimism that brings people together with the idea of creating something new. Even as Hex reels through the catastrophic present, amid tears and confrontations and the shadow of death, the novel shows with great tenderness the beauty of everyday longings for shelter, for company, for family, for peace.

About this title

Review

‘Moody is a unique stylist whose beautiful prose weaves helixes of language around the simplest of events... Without that style, Moody’s story might have become mere sentiment. With it, he conjures an altogether rare element of human feeling.’
Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times

‘Powerful and engrossing... Purple America further establishes the author as part of a gifted generation of American writers concerned with crises of masculinity and modernity.’
Paul Quinn, TLS

From the Back Cover

"Billie Raitliffe is dying of a wasting disease in a grand house that is falling apart-like she is. Her second husband Lou, on his last day as a manager at the nuclear plant, leaves her a note saying he can't take it anymore. Billie gets her son Dexter, known fittingly as Hex (everything he touches goes wrong) to come out from New York. Then she asks him to help her to die...The extraordinary thing about this dense, compelling novel is Moody's technical control...you have to admire the fertility of his imagination, the artistic skill he deploys to sculpt something so gargantuan out of such little, lost lives."
PETER BUCKMAN, 'Sunday Telegraph'

"Powerful and engrossing...Rick Moody's third, and best, novel...further establishes the author as part of a gifted generation of American writers concerned with crises of masculinity and modernity...'Purple America' charts our attempts and failures to communicate, focuses on the wonderful but impelling thing that is language."
PAUL QUINN, 'TLS'

"Rick Moody's densely stylish novel of decay and unfulfilled promise...picks through the debris of lives, diluted by disappointment and wrecked by the failure of bright young dreams, and gives it a kind of dignity. There are moments when perfection sundances. 'Purple America' has an originality and a sense of humour that sails over the polluted sludge of its subject matter...Moody is a master craftsman."
ANGUS WOLFE-MURRAY, 'Scotsman'

"This novel will establish Rick Moody as one of the next generation of important American writers...The passages catching the distinct but parallel attitudes of Lou and Hex are masterful-deft, collusive, frank and keen...It is Moody's style that raises the book beyond the merely good. Not only are his sentences well cadenced but he also succeeds in conveying exact nuances of both mood and scene without becoming either too clinical or too lush. And it's also surprisingly funny...surely one of the books of the year."
EDWARD DOCX, 'Sunday Express'

"This isn't just a hyped novel – it's a great one...searing and brilliant."
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About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0316559776
• ISBN 13: 9780316559775
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 298