Moody reads at Borders

"Purple America" is a difficult novel to interpret, because its situations toe the fine line of the humorous: A local seafood joint where Hex the drunk attempts to pick up women with sensitive questions while his multiple sclerosis mom, Billie, is trapped in the restaurant booth, unable to let him know that she needs to use the restroom. And step-dad's on the TV telling them the local nuke plant is leaking radioactive matter into the bay.

The lush descriptions evoke specific places, and, at times, they even verge on poetry, in lines such as "Hex was a boy finger-painted with his father's blood."

Moody's vitamin-fortified prose (the dictionary is your friend) and narrative structure almost cover the plot's spine: the nuke plant, Billie's disorder and failing marriage.

While the details can sound overwrought, Moody's style is the fractured level of daily reality. But it is the purposeful glitches in Moody's prose that are most thought-provoking. When the main focus is Billie, the reader fades from physical reality with her - not knowing where she is, subsisting on memories, her questioning of what her numbed body is doing now. Much of Billie is known only by Billie and the reader, because human interaction is so difficult.

This creates an oscillation between Billie and Hex, who's lifelong stutter is represented on the page. In "Purple America," communication is difficult at many levels. Moody shows disintegration of mundane daily activities and a complete break with reality - perhaps the most sensational breaks are where the novel becomes operatic.

Asked in a recent interview about the purpose of writing, Moody said, "The real reason that I do anything is to solve problems for myself.

"But I think that the principle function of literature is that it's an art, and that means we get close to what an individual mind doing its job looks like, and everyone wants to know that ... literature, I think, has always gotten close to 'universal truth,' and that's what I see myself trying to do."

Rick Moody reads Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at Borders Books. The Michigan Theatre will be showing a movie based on another of his books, "Ice Storm," at 9 p.m. that night.

-Cara Spindler

05-11-98