Just finished reading Rick Moody's Purple America. Yeah, so I'm a few years late in submitting my application to join the lustrous club of Those Who Have Read Rick Moody. (I hear there's a lot of women in this club. I'll try not to seem too boorish. Or falsely graduate-studentish sensitively deep-thinkingish.)
This book was simultaneously compelling and ugly. We'll start with the bad: Moody's style, at least in this book, it's all about the rampant overuse of italics. You're either going to dig 'em, or your going to think he's a windbaggy blowhard. Just my hunch. I'll admit: I've been known to slant some prose now and then, right here on this blog. I hope they add a conversational effect or suggest vocal tones I'm too lazy to imply otherwise. Moody, though, goes poop-all crazy with 'em. Now and then, they worked; the italics were there for a genuine reason, they added stress that clarified and enhanced both meaning and tone. Then other times it's like the cat jumped on Ctrl-I while humping the computer's mouse. Often I couldn't find logical reasons for certain phrases or words to be stressed. After a while, the italics became like white noise, dropped from conscious perception.
(White Noise, by Don Delillo--coincidentally--being a book that Purple America reminded me of. Probably mostly for the family drama meets big toxic event background plot parallels; there may be more to it but it's been four years since I read Delillo's book, and I just gave my copy of White Noise to my girlfriend, along with her copy of the Moody book, plus I'm booked reading-wise for the next month, so no comparative analyses from this guy anytime soon.)
So there's the italics--which were ugly--and there's the wickedly twisted syntactical strategies--the long sentences that hop around like bunnies on trampolines, the rushing prose lending to everything a sense of (potentially unwarranted) importance--which I was okay with. The voice, it's sort of charmingly addictive, and definitely distinct. Though sometimes I'd find myself reaching the ends of climactic pages without having a clue what I'd just read. I think the textual gambits didn't connect with me as well as, say, Infinite Jest's stylistic slap-shots. Generally Purple America's style doesn't settle for subtlety when blunt hammer-to-the-face techniques can be used instead, even when the hammers sometimes miss.
So let's be blunt: the voice should not have worked. It didn't work for me, the first time I tried to read the book, a year or two back; I threw it down in disgust after about twenty pages, convinced that this was not a book I wanted to devote time to, that those people who spoke of Moody fondly were clearly insane. Why I decided to spend these last few days on it is as much the result of a randomly renewed curiosity about this guy I've heard so much about (due in part to the recent publication of Moody's latest novel The Diviners; see also the intro of this interview), as it was the result of the horrible sense of guilt I've had every time I've looked at this copy of Purple America that I borrowed from my girlfriend a year or so ago, who I know for a fact is not insane. Whose taste in books I've generally meshed with. Having had a few days that needed to be filled with one book, it seemed like the right time to right some wrongs about myself and my relationship to the contemporary cultural canon and my desire to continue having my girlfriend like me and not think I'm a total dunce.
None of that has anything to do with why I liked the book. I didn't expect to like it: I thought, still, that it was going to be a total chore, one of those "taking medicine" novels. Why I liked the book had everything to do with the fact that in spite of its stylistic flaws (which it should now be argued aren't so much flaws as they are attempts to get to something otherwise out of reach) this book boasted an amazingly compelling story, deeply fucked up characters with fascinating motivations, strange relationships that beg to be probed for explanation and understanding, and the potential for major nuclear disaster, which, a, is my personal kryptonite as far as willingness to not read a given piece of literature, and, b, is something I had no idea was coming, having not gotten that far the first time I tried to read the book. (Had I known then what I know now I might have gotten this book back to my girlfriend a lot sooner.) How much of all of this plot-level detail actually depended on the alternatingly loathsome and awesome style--because, yes, there are moments, wonderful moments, when everything stylistic fell into place, and bluntness gave way to the subtle, and it would be like page-magic--is not a question I'm awake enough to answer. But I'm tempted to say this teeter-totter of everything balances on a fulcrum of the word conflict.
And in the end the thing is this: I've read this book, and now I'd like to read more of his stuff.
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