With The Ice Storm and The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, Rick Moody established himself as one of the boldest and most imaginative writers at work today. Now, in Purple America, he delivers the tour-de-force triumph fans have been waiting for -- a masterly novel that recalls the best work of Updike and Roth.Hex Raitliffe's family is fissioning. His ailing and elderly mother has lately been abandoned by his stepfather, and Hex has been summoned home to tangle not only with adult responsibilities, but with painful memories of the past. Drinking isn't helping. The romantic uncertainties of adolescence, in the person of one Jane Ingersoll, only muddle things more. And confronting his stepfather, who's mired in a crisis of his own at the dilapidated nuclear power plant down the coast, is definitely a mistake. Over the course of a single incendiary night, Hex, his mother, his stepfather -- and a cast including ghosts of family and friends past and present -- will discover the devastating uncertainty principles of family.
Cast in a brilliant series of interknit voices, Purple America explores the profound connections between the forces that bind both family and the society in which familial love is played out.
- ISBN10 0002256878
- ISBN13 9780002256872
- Publish Date 2 March 1998 (first published 1 April 1997)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 26 March 1999
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Imprint Flamingo
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 304
- Language English