Purple America

Rick Moody

When Rick Moody released The Ice Storm a few years back, he was heralded as the next big thing in the publishing business. Then Ang Lee got ahold of it and made it into a box-office flop that garnered critical acclaim from here to tomorrow, and is widely considered one of the finest films of the nineties that no one actually saw.

Moody's followup is Purple America, and it's horrible. Unreadably thick prose with no letup. Where most trade paperbacks clock in at a minute and a half or so per page for me, I was spending ten to twenty minutes a page on this, and that's without the patented Julia Kristeva "dictionary by the side to look up every third word" necessity. It's just plain hard to read. And it shouldn't be-- it's a pretty simple story about a guy called home to care for his ailing mother. It's not necessarily bogged down by philosophy, or by reflection, or any of the things that make bogging down worthwhile; it's just hard to read. There's no real reason for it I can put my finger on. I even gave it a second (and a third and a fourth) chance thanks to a raging endorsement from Barry Hannah, one of the handful of authors who's actually written a truly perfect novel (The Tennis Handsome), but I finally ended up throwing it onto the fire to combat the high cost of heating the apartment with gas.