Books like Purple America

With The Ice Storm and The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, Rick Moody established himself as one of the boldest and most imaginative writers at work today. Now, in Purple America, he delivers the tour-de-force triumph fans have been waiting for -- a masterly novel that recalls the best work of Updike and Roth.Hex Raitliffe's family is fissioning. His ailing and elderly mother has lately been abandoned by his stepfather, and Hex has been summoned home to tangle not only with adult responsibilities, but with painful memories of the past. Drinking isn't helping. The romantic uncertainties of adolescence, in the person of one Jane Ingersoll, only muddle things more. And confronting his stepfather, who's mired in a crisis of his own at the dilapidated nuclear power plant down the coast, is definitely a mistake. Over the course of a single incendiary night, Hex, his mother, his stepfather -- and a cast including ghosts of family and friends past and present -- will discover the devastating uncertainty principles of family.Cast in a brilliant series of interknit voices, Purple America explores the profound connections between the forces that bind both family and the society in which familial love is played out.