Rick Moody
Purple America
Upon Philip Larkin’s death,
Little, Brown, 304 pp. $ 22.95 one writer observed that while his verse could not be faulted on technical grounds, Larkin would never be admitted to the front rank of poets because his work did not affirm anything. he novelist Rick Moody inspires a similar reflection. Though he is now very accomplished, in what I think we are supposed to call the post-modern style, one searches in vain in his novels for any hint of a belief that life is worth living. In Moody’s third novel, Purple America, there is even an appearance by that ultimate emblem of life-sucks teen nihilism: our old pal, the mushroom cloud.
One would not mind this so much if it came from a less gifted writer. Nor would one expect much else: Affirmation is not exactly common coin in the precious little world of current literary fiction — a state of affairs only natural in a civilization whose intellectual classes affect to despise it. Still it seems a waste for a writer as gifted as Moody to have his gaze so determinedly fixed inward and downward.
His debut, Garden State, was a dismal, very first-novelish tale of the blue-collar blues: underemployed twentysomethings addling their brains with booze, drugs, and rock music in the post-industrial wastelands of New Jersey. (In the photograph on the dust jacket, Moody even contrived to look like Bruce Springsteen.) A sort of watery sunlight came through at the book’s end, but the overall atmosphere was one of gloom and futility.
A shower of gold descended on Moody’s second novel, The Ice Storm: It has just been made into a movie by the brilliant and trendy director Ang Lee. In The Ice Storm, a tale of a Connecticut family that undergoes a crisis over a winter weekend in the early 1970s, the angst is suburban and upper middle class, but just as relentless. The publisher’s hype raised inevitable comparisons to Updike and Cheever; comparisons that only serve to highlight the problem. Updike belongs, and Cheever belonged, to a generation still in touch, if only at second hand, with the older, simpler, harsher America. Even at their most mordant, they never shed that postwar elan, that sense that what is is so very, so unexpectedly better than what was. In the lowest depths of ennui, their people still possess a vestigial understanding that, as boring and pointless as suburban life frequently seems, it sure beats farm work. Moody’s characters do not know this.
Now it is indubitably true everywhere, even in the suburbs, that “man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.” But that is only the first half of the proposition as originally stated, and cannot sustain a novel, much less a whole body of work. In Purple America, I think I detect some dawning realization of this truth on Rick Moody’s part, the book’s portentous mushroom cloud notwithstanding. I hope I am right. At his glummest, he is a very good writer; when cheerfulness breaks through, he is superb.
Meet, then, Hex Raitliffe, a middle-aged loser mottled with social stigmata: stammer, drinking problem, meaningless job, single status. Hex has been summoned from Manhattan to his mother’s house in coastal Connecticut. Billie, the mother, is in the last stages of a progressive neurological disease. Once a woman of spirit and sensibility, she is now quadriplegic, almost speechless, and prone to wet herself. (Seems to me that an indwelling catheter is indicated, but the author is determined to spare us none of the grisly realities of quadriplegic care.)
The occasion of the summons is that Billie’s husband Lou, Hex’s stepfather, has abandoned her. On learning this, Hex pours himself a stiff drink. Then he has a few more, and soon he is soused enough to convert a crisis into a catastrophe. The encompassing action of the book covers only a few hours — Friday night to Saturday morning — but that is as long as it takes for commonplace events to unravel into chaos, in both the private and public worlds. For stepfather Lou is a manager at the nuclear-power plant nearby; and while Hex is blundering through his own and his mother’s travails, Lou, stopping off at the plant for a last afternoon at work before heading off out of everybody’s life, discovers a major leak of radioactive material into Long Island Sound.
In flashbacks, we learn of Hex’s father, who worked on the Manhattan Project in World War Two and later made a modest fortune in uranium mining, but died of an aneurysm when Hex was 11. A very dramatic passage adapted from Jungk’s Brighter Than a Thousand Suns is inserted; and there is a hint that Hex’s problems may have begun with the irradiation of his father’s gonads. The point of all this is presumably to lift our attention from the personal to the historical. Perhaps that too is a sign that Moody is ready to let his talent roam over a wider field than the mall and the half-acre lot. If so, though, he should probably try to do it in a less obvious fashion.
Purple America is sometimes very funny, and it is marvelous how far Moody’s prose style has come in the five years since Garden State. It is worth bothering to chide a performer for falling short of the first-rate only when he is capable of the first-rate; in Rick Moody’s case, there is ample evidence of it.
John Derbyshire is the author of the novel Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream.
