SOURCE: “Purple Haze,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 20, 1997, p. 12.

In the following review, Frank maintains that Purple America is “an original and reverberative novel” despite finding shortcomings in the novel's characterizations and unsatisfying ending.

Purple America, is a robust book. It is a book whose capacious arms reach up out of the bold second sentence—four pages long and surprisingly assured—to embrace a striking range of thought, memory and feeling. These arms manage to grasp people longing and people loving; people seeking and people struggling; people in deep distress, both physical and psychological; and people inhabiting a land that is in its own distress—a land that is purple the way storm clouds are purple and nuclear explosions are purple, yet also the way mountains wear this hue, with purple majesty. The themes Moody has taken on in this, his third novel (following Garden State...