[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, Billie's second husband, are real to more than their own emotions. Reality here is not just the frayed inner reality of characters in trouble; there are national troubles afoot as well, and the characters are never separate from them. These crises and conflicts that summon Hex from New York City, cause Lou to leave Billie, and bring Billie to the point where she wishes to die would never survive a summary. Suffice it to say that the novel never feels overburdened with too much conflict or, more miraculously, ruined by a resolution that's too tidy.

What distinguishes Purple America is not its family plot, but what Moody does in addition to it. His novel is as rich in specifics as it is in generalities, patterns, economic forces, social history, and cultural observations, all the huge, gravitational movements of people toward some state of mind nobody has a name for yet. Some passages begin in generality: “Misfits and idiot savants, coveters of weapons-related data, fundamentalists, borderline personalities, pot smokers, people who fell through the cracks of a franchise-fueled economy; these were the guardians of the atomic age.” This roll call of types is followed by Lou Sloane's closer observation of one such guardian—“Dave McCluskey, his name was”—who is just one individual at a nuclear power plant where both are employed.

Surprisingly, generalities and specifics work well together. The writing on large patterns that overcome characters lends credence to the specific predicaments of those characters. Similarly, specifics insure that the generalities never lapse into the universal. Micro and macro, specific and general, Purple America is at once set specifically in Connecticut and, generally, in a wider world. This is a family story that is unafraid to be larger than the dinner table, weightier than the average couch, and not so still as the view from many fictional windows. Moody has found a way to take the family narrative and open it up to what's forever outside and often unacknowledged. Purple America is an inviting and generous novel.