SOURCE: “Slanted Types,” in Times Literary Supplement, February 27, 1998, p. 22.

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

If the stuttering, alcoholic, Hex Raitliffe is the official and somewhat over-qualifiedly anti-hero of Purple America, Rick Moody's third, and best, novel, the book's unofficial Chorus is provided by, and in, italics. At one level, the book is, like Moody's acclaimed The Ice Storm (1994), an exercise in social comedy and observation—this time depicting an upscale Connecticut family's encounter with the bleak realities of deterioration of the body, the environment and the modern world. Hex, is endowed with a whole armoury of bathetic accessories designed to elicit our sympathy and amusement. He has a drink problem, he is feckless, he is sexually inept and consonantally challenged.

This last affliction points to a crucial and more ambitious aspect of the novel—the way it charts our attempts...