Purple America - Rick Moody

Relatively young and a member of the burgeoning "MFA Movement" in Literature, Rick Moody does not pull any punches in Purple America and sticks to a relatively simple formula, which pays off in the end. I have not read The Ice Storm but I saw the movie long ago and it is very good and I would like to see it again and I would like to read the book. But no matter, Purple America could be made into a pretty good movie too.

The novel concerns a character named Dexter who is called Hex instead because that is the way he pronounced it as a baby. Hex is in his late 30's, a New Yorker, and works some vague job in proofreading or publishing. He has been called back to his mother's Connecticut estate to care for her in what appear to be her dying days. I bought this book at last year's Printer's Row Book Fair in Chicago, and I read the first chapter while eating outside at a cafe. It is a very ambitious first chapter, consisting of one elaborately long sentence describing in detail all the sacrifices Hex has to make in order to care for his mother in her very ill state. It brought to my mind my mother's care of my grandmother over the last several years of her life when she was suffering from Alzheimer's, and it brings to my mind what I may in fact have to do one day if all does not go according to plan and my parents do fail to outlive me (an unlikely scenario at the moment). Later, I was sent a portion of a "WIP" novel (four pages, gasp!) by a person who told me her writing was better than mine, and in accordance with courtesy, I sent her my opinion on her work, and I asked her if she had ever read Purple America, because it appeared as if she had ripped it off terribly, when in fact, she had probably never seen the thing.

The fact is, the theme of this novel is caring for a sick parent, the way the theme for Dr. Faustus is genius, and the theme for Professor of Desire is sex & relationships, and the theme for A Long Way Down is suicide. And there are probably only so many things you can say about caring for a sick parent. It is a devastating experience. There is a loss of dignity. The world comes crashing down and your own life appears meaningless when held up against the light of the dying person's nearly-complete end.

But this is not a sad novel at all. If anything, it is a comic novel, and it takes place over the course of just a few days, featuring Hex's stepfather, who recently left her when her illness became too unbearable for him to care for any longer, and Jane Ingersoll, Hex's love interest, a classmate in high school and a denizen of the bar Hex takes his mother to eat at on the novel's final, endless night. Hex's stepfather works at a nuclear power plant that has just had some sort of meltdown, the cataclysmic catastrophe to offset the Mrs. dying. At one point, Hex tracks down his stepfather and (it should be noted that he drinks an awful lot throughout the novel), walking around with a six-pack, finds the house of a friend where he is briefly staying, and attempts to confront him and make him return to care for the mother. This is one of the best scenes of the novel, along with the scene in the restaurant, and the rest of the evening that never seems to end.

Purple America takes a little while to get into, but because the action is so compacted, the reader is drawn to continue on and finish quickly. It is a quick read, a relatively light read, but certainly one of the best novels I have read on its topic, and probably iconic for that matter. It is continually hilarious, though at times veering too much into the ridiculous. There are a few scenes that Moody might have been able to cut that slow the narrative down, particularly the sub-plot of the stepfather's troubles, which actually then, becomes more interesting than the mother's suffering.

Important to understand the novel though, is that while the mother suffers, she seems only to act meaner than previously. She is not a totally sympathetic character. In this way, Purple America is different from your typical stories of death and dying. While hardly essential, this is a good, strong, modern novel (published in 1994 or so, if I am not mistaken, and as the follow-up to The Ice Storm) that could be turned into an Academy Award winning film.

But one further note on Moody, a former student in Columbia's MFA writing program, a program I applied to a year ago because of his celebrity as an alum. He stays in relatively safe territory. So do most other writers earning their MFA and publishing on a national stage. If you are an ordinary person from an ordinary American family, you will probably find this book nice and enjoyable and entertaining. I did. But if you are not completely resigned to a life of ordinary, typically American events, you may find the novel to be exasperating and annoying. But that is unlikely. While no Doctor Faustus, Purple America is easily better than The Professor of Desire and A Long Way Down in terms of craft, execution, and originality. I say originality and I have claimed it is a very typical theme for a novel, but as I said before too, this is an iconic treatment of a typical theme and therefore, is original.

A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby

A Long Way Down is a recent novel by Nick Hornby (published in 2005, if memory serves) which I read roughly five months ago. Of Hornby's oeuvre, I have read High Fidelity and Songbook. No About a Boy, no How to be Good, no Fever Pitch, et al. It is perhaps worth noting that Hornby achieves what, to my mind, is the greatest contribution a novelist can make to a society at this odd juncture of superfluous entertainment options. That is, to coin a phrase recognizable to a mass segment of the population: Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music? The other achievement of course, is that Hornby's books enjoy a very high percentage of film adaptation, most of which are generally approved by audiences. High Fidelity is of course his biggest hit to date, and the film version certainly added a lot of mileage by bringing in John Cusack and switching the city from London to Chicago. About a Boy and Fever Pitch had films made out of them to slightly lesser degrees of success, but the fact remains Nick Hornby is certainly in the Top 5 Novelists in their Prime in 2008.

I bought A Long Way Down from Borders because it was part of a Buy 1, Get 1 50% off deal but it was not necessarily a waste of money. I also bought it for egotistical reasons. Immediately upon reading the description, I realized that Hornby's novel was extremely similar to my first novel, and I had to read it to see how he made it work. Someone famous like him could certainly give me some pointers in the way of getting published. He read in L.A. last October 26 or so, and I wanted to interview him afterwards to ask him about these sorts of things, but I did nothing that night instead.

The novel concerns four characters--Maureen, Jessica, J.J., and Martin--who accidentally meet each other on New Year's Eve on the top of a building. Each of them planned to commit suicide. Maureen has an invalid son that she must constantly attend to, denying her much of any social life, as she wades through her early fifties. Jessica is an 18 year old girl who has recently broken up with her boyfriend and who generally, amongst all the characters, is the stupidest and most annoying. J.J. is a 27 year old American musician who moved to London to be with his girlfriend, who recently broke up with him, and likewise his band, and is now delivering pizza. Martin is a formerly successful ex-host of a TV show like Regis & Kelly in his mid-forties who slept with a 15 year old girl, ruining his marriage, family and career.

Each of them wants to die, but they keep each other from doing it, and they have a variety of adventures as a "foursome," most notably when Jessica claims they didn't jump because they saw an angel, and then all three others have to lie and agree with her so the tabloid story holds water.

The problem with the novel is the same problem with my first novel--it floats around aimlessly, content to record the characters' witty asides instead of finding a proper resolution for the narrative. I did like the ending, however, because it refused to make any concrete declarations about the futures of these characters. The characters do go through changes though--Maureen lives a little more and grows to appreciate the little things, Jessica begins to act slightly more grown up, J.J. makes amends with his girlfriend and his best friend/bandmate, and Martin even sees his ex-wife and daughters and begins a difficult climb back to respectability.

What is most endearing about the novel is the way the characters latch onto one another and become friends and support one another through their life's obstacles, as trivial as they may sometimes be. At times it seems as if they are having fun, but usually they are really just trying to make sense of why they wanted to kill themselves, whether their life is really worth living or not, and what they are going to do now that they are still alive.

While High Fidelity may be about as perfect a modern novel as there is, A Long Way Down attempts a more experimental, almost philosophical, story, and in return loses a certain charm. One criticism of my first novel is that many people do not know which character to care about (there are 10). That is one similar thing I could say about this. I want to care about all of them, but I end up caring most about Martin, to be honest. Maureen also, is very sweet, but J.J. and Jessica are both young and their issues seem more trivial somehow, though one knows from experience that their problems are probably just as psychically traumatizing. It is much easier to care about Rob in High Fidelity than any single character in this novel, because there is a definite plot to his life. In a plotless atmosphere, Hornby attempts to diagnose modern depression and define the suicidal impulse, an admirable goal for a novel. However, one feels it might have been more effective to have focused on a single character, rather than four, but I am sure the ensuing adaptation (one can only assume...) will be highly entertaining and more original than 90% of the fare Hollywood shovels out in 2010.