PURPLE AMERICA

Rick Moody

Back Bay Books/Little, Brown

298 pp., $13.95

There is a certain, dangerous school of modern fiction that believes that a bit of trouble is all that's necessary in a good book. Throw in some personality tics, add a major societal problem for the main character to grapple with, and bingo! You've just won the Seventeen magazine fiction contest and a three-book deal with a major publishing house!

A capsule review of Purple America by Rick Moody (author of The Ice Storm, which was made into a critically acclaimed movie) would seem to condemn it as an example of this type of writing: Billie Raitcliffe has a thing for men who work with radioactivity (personality tic) and a degenerative muscular disease; her husband just left her and she asks her son to euthanize her when her illness gets too severe (societal problem; two, if you count the separation). Hex, her son, has to decide whether he can shoulder the burden of caring for his mother alone (societal problem) even as he copes with his alcoholism and is sever stammer (personality tics).

And any other writer of Rick Moody's generation would have used a plot like this as an excuse to hold a pity party--indeed, probably would have created the plot expressly to condemn the previous generation for messing up the world, etc., etc. But Moody makes no moral judgments on the sad state of affairs in Connecticut that has hemmed Hex and Billie and Billie's husband Lou Sloane into standard suburban lives; instead, he analyzes and describes and unravels character and action and landscape in scintillating prose. He is a young author who chooses to write about rather sordid, dull aspects of modern life, to be sure, but he follows an old, old tradition of writing wellcrafted, intelligent novels with Purple America.

Hex Raitcliffe, as Moody makes very clear in the first short chapter of the novel, is a hero, "and if he's a hero, 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." He is a saint maybe, like one of the exceedingly normal yet extraordinarily courageous and strong characters who populate the works of Anne Tyler; a modern day tragic hero whose Achilles' heel and fatal flaw is a penchant for liquor. Lou Sloane's abrupt and cruel parting from Billie rouses Hex from his lackadaisical work as a publicist. Hex is the only other person who can interpret his mother's "syllabic puree;" he knows that Lou has stuck him 'with her, yet he gradually comes to accept and even relish the challenge of caring for her.

Yet one can't even hate Lou, whose presence is central to the book even though he abandoned Billie. He had been aware of what would eventually happen to Billie at the time of their marriage, but then, "when she was still on the cane, she had a face like the dimensions of a crystal, all chiseled with wisdom, smarts, heartache, all beautiful like a flock of birds scared up off the cove, all beautiful like the sound of cellos..." he had thought himself equal to the task of caring for her as she deteriorated. After he forfeits his well-loved job at the local nuclear power plant in a final act of loyalty to cover a policy mistake, he inventories his suddenly unsatisfactory life and realizes what a drain Billie has become, and vanishes.

Lou doesn't travel very far, however, because he still loves Billie and because he wants to be useful in the face of a crisis at the nuclear power plant. His wandering contrasts nicely with Hex's, who in the course of the evening on which the book is set takes his mother to a restaurant and to a hospital, drunkenly stalks Lou in an effort to convince him to return to Billie, and kindles a romance with the dreamgirl of his adolescence as she falls into his life "like an influenza." All the while, Hex and Billie are haunted by the infrequent but always searingly memorable references to Hex's dad, long-deceased ex-nuclear scientist. Allen Raitcliffe. Yet somehow the decisions and bizarre events of the evening seem not at all forced or sudden (until the rather weak ending); the Raitcliffe's story seems predestined, foreordained, and the characters are merely performing their inevitable actions according to plan even when they act illogically.

Moody's exceptional command of language is largely responsible for the success of these characters and of Purple America. He's got a knack for poeticizing the mundane with a well-placed, nicely phrased philosophical riff, like when Lou interrupts his constant agonizing over the power plant to observe "the sun balanced on the very spot where sea meets coast." The nuances of Hex's odd childhood, when pretentious Billie served him meals with "frozen foods accompanying the fine wines of Bordeaux," and when Hex wanted nothing more than to muse over "the math of [girls'] pulses," are immaculately rendered.

Moody has the unusual talent of being able to describe a scene beautifully is slow motion with language that never gets boring; his description of Hex's high school flame's walk to his table is unforgettable.

The suspense and the brilliant writing of Purple America is sustained almost through the entire book; the last scene seems a bit maudlin, a bit too pat an ending to the complex situation Moody describes so movingly throughout the book. Everything else in the book, however, is as near perfection as you're likely to find in fiction these days.