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  • Rick Moody’s Purple America:Gothic Resuscitation in the Nuclear Age
  • Kenneth Millard

The fiction of Rick Moody has shown a consistent interest in the subject of adolescence from Garden State to The Black Veil. It is in adolescence that Moody dramatizes important points of origin or watershed moments that come to define the unique predicaments of adulthood. Not only does Moody's fiction locate adult problems in the experiences of adolescence, but it is often marked stylistically by an intense self-consciousness which is also characteristic of teenagers' struggles to define themselves as individuals. For example, in The Ice Storm (1994) the teenager's voice is used in the first person to frame an omniscient narrative and to provide a vital personal element to Moody's otherwise clinically dispassionate social satire of the early 1970s. The Ice Storm is a form of coming-of-age novel where the teenager's journey over a single weekend gives an adolescent intensity to the narrative. This temporal compression (often characteristic of the modern bildungsroman) is also a notable feature of Purple America (1997) a novel that similarly dramatizes the predicament of adults who are "stalled" and whose lives are revealed to have been crucially determined by childhood experiences that are impossible to overcome. Both The Ice Storm and Purple America are novels about paralysis and death, and they use adolescence as an origin myth that has both personal and national significance. But where The Ice Storm is notable for its use of both first-person and third-person narrative voices, Purple America abandons the idea of a unified narrative voice altogether for something much more complex in its linguistic ingenuity. This facilitates aesthetic innovations that problematize the concept of narrative authority, and such a challenge to authority is itself characteristic of adolescence. Purple America is characterized by a radical self-consciousness about the language of narrative voice, and by a formal self-reflexivity that acts as a commentary on the novel's multiple, Joycean, languages, even to the point of anticipating critical paradigms that might be used to interpret it. One of the vital formal [End Page 253] questions that Purple America asks is where does a novelist find the authority beyond existing linguistic structures by which to challenge authority? Simultaneously Purple America is concerned with locating that crisis in a specific national narrative (the emergence of nuclear power) in order to facilitate much wider social and political analysis of the contemporary United States than the bildungsroman might usually allow.

Purple America is a novel about crisis and failure, especially failing powers of speech and crises of articulation. It sets out to provide a historical account of the domestication of nuclear power, while simultaneously offering a disquisition on the ability of language to speak about such things and to create an aesthetic artifact from them. It is a novel that asks self-consciously: how did we get here? That question is directed both at technology and at the language that might be used to articulate the history of technology. Most of all, the novel parodies a variety of linguistic registers that it clearly deems to be redundant or trite, and it sets them alongside other forms of creative language by way of evaluative comparison. In this respect, Purple America is a form of metafiction, deploying a range of linguistic styles as part of the wider aesthetic strategy of asking of itself: what is the appropriate language with which to speak of these subjects? It is a novel that comments on its own linguistic identity, and self-evaluation is an integral part of its parody of those linguistic registers that it deems to be exhausted. In 1967 John Barth argued that "Exhaustion is just an invitation to administer artificial resuscitation to the apparently dead" (Barth, 32), and Purple America is a novel that takes up this invitation and constitutes itself from it. The idea of exhaustion is central to the drama, narrative, and theme of the novel, and central also to a concern about the nature of its own aesthetic style.

Such postmodern preemption was of course already a convention when Purple America was published in 1997, and it is a narrative strategy...

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