SOURCE: A review of Purple America, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XVII, No. 3, Fall, 1997, pp. 226–27.

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

In a traditional allegory characters stand in for their qualities. Goodness, Courage, and Charity stride about, going head-to-head and hand-to-hand with their well-known evil twins. In both The Ice Storm, his last novel, and Purple America, Rick Moody writes a kind of demographic allegory. Characters in the novel are at once people in an unfolding drama as well as a segment of the American population, recognizable pieces of the most recent census, say, people of a certain educational background, a certain size house, a certain quality of clothing, a certain grade of household appliances.

The Raitliffes, a nuclear family in the early stages of meltdown, are the primary characters in this novel, and Billie, her son Hex, and Lou Sloane...