SOURCE: “A Full Day: Rick Moody's Rich, Dazzling Novel of 24 Hours in the Life of a Troubled Family,” in Chicago Tribune Books, May 11, 1997, p. 5.

In the following review, Solomon offers a positive assessment of Purple America.

Rick Moody's extraordinary third novel [Purple America] covers just one fateful day in the lives of the troubled Raitliffe family, yet seldom has an author crowded so much substance into 24 hours.

Billie Raitliffe, 70, has spent two decades in her opulent Connecticut home wasting away with a neurological disease. She has lost her eyesight, her speech, her muscular functions and finally her will to live. And now, even her second husband, Lou Sloane, has left her. Lou's desertion, announced in the apparently heartless form of a note typed on her computer, has summoned Billie's only son, aptly named Hex, from his foundering Manhattan job as a free-lance publicist. But as the alcoholic, stuttering...