Having fled his less than perfect home life years ago, Hal Raitcliffe returns to help his ailing mother after his stepfather walks out on her, but over the course of one weekend, Hal's good intentions wear thin as the family airs its grievances. 50,000 first printing. Tour. Purple America begins in a bathtub and ends in Long Island Sound. In between, Rick Moody's latest novel explores the landscape of a family in crisis. Dexter (Hex) Raitliffe, a freelance publicist, returns home to care for his mother, Billie, who is dying by inches of a neurological disease that will rob her of motion, of speech, and finally of thought. Billie's second husband has left her--a fact that Hex is unaware of until he comes home--and her only hope for assisted suicide lies in her son. Unfortunately, Hex is barely able to conduct his own life, much less take his mother's. Purple America takes place over the course of a single night; in that night, Hex gives his mother a bath, reconnects with an old love, gets drunk, and goes after his stepfather to confront him, with tragic results. As Moody weaves his tale of this fateful Friday evening, he juxtaposes themes of aging, obsolescence, and physical decline with an accident at the nuclear power plant where his stepfather works. What lifts this novel above its rather depressing subject matter is Moody's unsentimental storytelling and the soaring language with which he gives his characters voice. Purple America is by turns lyrical, tragic, ferocious, and funny, and Rick Moody is a writer with a brilliant future ahead of him. The explosive cleavage of the atom and its attendant fallout provide the arch-metaphor for Moody's third novel. Billie Raitliffe, of Fenwick, Connecticut, suffers from a paralyzing neuralgic disorder and cannot care for herself. Younger husband Lou Sloane, a nuclear plant manager, has moved out, so she calls on her middle-aged, alcoholic son Dexter (Hex). The specter of Hex's father, a Manhattan Project scientist who died of radiation poisoning, hovers perceptibly over the proceedings. In a 36-hour span, Billie is injured, Hex consummates a lingering high school crush in a bizarre fashion, and Lou presides over a nuclear emergency the day of his forced early retirement. The events do not occur discretely but are part of a chain reaction Moody engineers in an atomic experiment. He renders his findings in vivid, intense, and often unpleasant detail, effectively reviving the nuclear threat and limning its symbolic and etymological resonance with domestic breakdown (half-life, decay) without denying the humanity of the characters or the centrality of the story. Despite the occasionally overwrought prose, Moody has redrawn the suburban landscape, as defined by Updike and Cheever. Fans of both will want to discover this new country.?Adam Mazmanian, "Library Journal" Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Moody tackles many dark themes here involving the pollution of the body, spirit, and environment, but he does so in prose that is so powerful and moving that reading his novel becomes a transfixing rather than a depressing experience. Melancholy alcoholic Hex Raitliffe has been summoned home by his invalid mother, Billie, the victim of a raging neurological disorder that has left her body paralyzed and her speech garbled. She has been abandoned by her second husband, Lou Sloane, the manager of a nuclear power plant. Lou has left Billie, not because she daily faces some grave new insult to her health, but because he cannot bear the fact that she has given up all hope. Hex, a trust-fund baby and a neglectful son, struggles mightily, if ineffectually, to rise to the challenge of caring for his mother and to talk her out of her request for help in killing herself. Over the course of an incendiary weekend, he works himself into a drunken fever, picks up a woman he used to have a crush on, confronts his stepfather, and, finally, disastrously, attempts to fulfill his mother's request. Closely interknitting his narrative with the lyrical, soaring monologues of all the key players, Moody effortlessly moves from one striking passage to the next. Although he takes his material straight from the blaring headlines (mercy killing, nuclear spillage), it's the characters' voices, so full of urgency and distress, that are unforgettable. Joanne Wilkinson 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 h