SOURCE: “Moody on Dark Humor, Bright Angels, and Quantum Leaps,” in Poets & Writers, Vol. 27, No. 2, March–April, 1999, pp. 37, 39, 41.

[In the following interview, Moody discusses the themes and writing of Purple America, his views on spirituality and morality, and the development of his prose style and artistic concerns.]

[Gordon:] Your work seems to center on how spirit might illuminate the soulless structure of social process. Are you aware of this when you write? And how important a role does social conscience play in your work?

[Moody:] Well, I certainly thought of Purple America as being a book that tried to elaborate valid, genuine, spiritual structures that were outside of institutional religious edifices, and to do so without being secular at the same time. In other words, to believe—to the extent that that really means something—but to resist received articulations about belief. And as far as the popular-culture stuff goes, I feel like that's perfectly valid terrain for me, and that the high/low distinction is a continuum, or it should be seen as a continuum, and that literature—with the full force of this word; literature that's ambitious to be literature—can certainly have plenty to do with the popular at the same time.

Family is an ideal microcosm for society, as the action of one member has reference and influence on the others. Do you think you'll keep using the nuclear family?

Well, family turns out to be—at least in America—the structure on which to project political interests and concerns. In other words, the best way to talk about America as a whole is to talk about the American family. So, I'm not necessarily interested in family on a limited scale, I'm interested in how every American political issue gets played out in that theater.

You called Purple America a dark novel, but even with its catastrophic conclusion it seemed to me more hopeful than earlier work. Maybe I'm perverse, but it seems you were writing through annihilation toward light. There's an almost Shivaistic quality to it.

I think that when I said it was dark I was probably trying to reassure people whose tastes are less ominous and apocalyptic than mine are. I think it's more hopeful probably than The Ice Storm is, for example, more hopeful than the novella, The Ring of Brightest Angels … but it deals with strenuous material, and it begins at a spot of particular complication and gets far more complicated, so to that extent it's dark, and it doesn't stop dealing with euthanasia and pollution and issues of mortality until page three-hundred-and-whatever. I think Purple America ends up demonstrating the possibilities of language and art to console, and love to console, but most people find reading about one's ill mother and whether or not to perform euthanasia upon her as being difficult and dark. I actually find the book very funny, you know.

Well, Francine Prose seems to appreciate your humor, particularly the “bad sex” sections. “Nobody ever writes about bad sex!” she said, enthusiastically, when I mentioned I was going to interview you.

I was going to be interviewed on the radio, on Fresh Air, by Terry Gross—she's tough, you know—and she said, “What was it like writing material that's this dark? Did you feel dark yourself while you were writing it?” And I said, “Well, Terry, I gotta say I actually find it funny.” And there was a pause—and she said, “You find a man giving his incurably ill mother who's quadriplegic a bath funny?” And so there I was, on the spot.

You probably finished Purple America at one of the most difficult times in your life. Do you think this came into play?

I don't think Purple America would have been probably as serious a book as it is if my sister hadn't died. It cast a long shadow.

Do you think writing can recover what's lost in life?

No, but I think writing about what's lost makes for really good work.

Are you a religious person?

I don't know. That's a tough, tricky question. I'm not institutionally spiritual, and I'm this way because of my differences with the religious structures that are available to us in America. I resist these institutions and I believe there are spiritual opportunities and structures that are opposed to their kind of rigidity.

Do you come from a religious background? I notice that the dedication on Joyful Noise is, in part, to John Moody.

He's my cousin. The answer is no. We didn't go to church every Sunday.

So, do you believe in the existence of evil?

That's a question that I've really wrestled with. My cousin, who in many ways is the person who helps me figure this stuff out, says that it's really playing fast and loose to presume that there isn't a force like that. And I guess over the years that I've been thinking about it, which is probably four or five years, I've come to see that I can't completely discount that idea, that maybe there is a force—but everything in me recoils from this and sees evil as being just the flawed nature of creation. I kind of like the take on evil that this world is flawed from the outset, and that we the people in it are flawed and that itself is part of evil.

Sometimes it seems like you're in search of new morals, which is kind of a refreshing change from just smashing the old and leaving it at that. Yet, as an amoral being, I still find some danger in this. Do you think of yourself as a moral writer?

I find this question fascinating, because of just what you say. I'm a highly educated Northeastern liberal, right? A liberal. In fact, I am a former would-be communist—I was a Trotskyite as an undergraduate—and I nonetheless feel that my peers who call themselves amoral, and I would include you in this list for the purpose of argument, are not amoral. Nevertheless, the climate in New York is such that one will court tremendous friction and dissent by using the word moral under any circumstances. For instance, if I say X, Y, or Z thing is immoral, I become assigned fundamentalist by my liberal peers in the media. And I think that that's tremendously shortsighted. As I said in the introduction to Joyful Noise, we all really believe in some stuff, and that constitutes a moral vision. But when you abdicate the responsibility of articulating your moral vision, you yield effective morality to whoever is willing to speak up. And that's really dangerous. So I think the liberal left does stand for things, that that is a liberal morality, and that it's worth talking about what that morality is. I've already gotten in trouble with this stuff and I've done a couple of interviews recently on The Ice Storm in which I said to a reporter, “Well, you know I think the morals of the seventies were a little fuzzy.” And they then presume that I'm a conservative and that means that I'm judging our great social experiment and all this stuff, you know. I just mean that actions from any period have consequences and it's fair for us to talk about what those consequences were.

Do you feel a constant struggle between the Nietzschean separation impulse and the desire to make society better?

Definitely. I can't really produce my art during a phase in which I'm totally engaged in society. But at the same time, I value society. So there is a real push and pull between retreat, in a spiritual sense, and earthly distractions. But that goes back to the monastic origins of religion in general; it goes back to how the whole reading and writing thing was first and foremost to edify the spirit.

How do you account for your quantum leap in style and command of prose that developed after The Ice Storm?

Well, I think it actually happened in the midst of The Ice Storm rather than after it. In fact, I think it happened sort of all at once in the beginning of the third section when Mikey starts meandering toward his execution. I suddenly realized … you know, I'd done a lot of thinking about plot, and I'd been a bad plotter as a student writer. I knew nothing about it. I didn't even understand what people were talking about when they talked about plot, and when I was learning how to use the novel as a form, I thought that I would really have to figure this plot business out and load my books with elaborate and premeditated stories in order to get people interested. And what I found suddenly in the third section of The Ice Storm was that a character in the midst of some dramatic situation, any dramatic situation, rendered in language that's new and spontaneous is plenty to drive a narrative. And then I realized that I didn't need big premeditated narratives to make novels grow, and so I started to let go of ideas about structure that were rigid and inflexible and instead took language and psychology to the fore.

Your voice, which has been referred to as a “loud and showy rev of engines,” is to me one of authority, a quality which is sadly lacking in today's young writers.

What's not stressed for people in our writing programs now is that the voice ends up being what's unique about a writer. Nabokov said something about this: What have I but my style?

You've said, “I'm not interested in writing a realistic story.” What are you interested in? And what, to you, constitutes reality?

What I meant when I said that, I suppose, would be American naturalistic fiction, and the whole mantle that goes with that. Dreiser, Jack London, Steinbeck, Jane Smiley, Rick Bass. I think Purple America is a very realistic book on a certain level, as is Ring of Brightest Angels. … But they're both ambitious stylistically and formally, and these things, in conventional thinking about fiction, are held to be at the opposite pole from realism. So that's the sense in which I mean I don't want to write realistic stories. I want to write stories that are full of style and formal ingenuity, if I can.

Do you think there are any conspicuous or secret flaws in your work? I think our weaknesses comprise our greatest strengths.

Well, I think everyone knows mine. I mean, I'm not a story architect probably. But I think what I've ended up doing has made that weakness a skill—you know, that's what Purple America did—so I'm happy with how it's turned out.