Rick Moody's Purple America: gothic resuscitation in the nuclear age.

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 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 that is integral to the genre of metafiction. Moody is the inheritor of a very considerable metafictional legacy here, the canon of which goes back as far as Gaddis's The Recognitions (1955), and which might briefly include the fiction of Nabokov and Donald Barthelme, Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Coover's Pricksongs and Descants (1969), Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew (1978), and Philip Roth's The Counterlife (1986). These novels, among others, had already made narrative self-reflexivity a familiar feature of innovative American fiction. Moody's novel is the inheritor of this particular formal genealogy, a legacy of works that discover ingenious ways to anticipate and internalize the methodologies of critical inquiry. The aesthetics of metafiction have received a lot of attention, both from novelists and critics, and this is itself significant. In particular, metafiction has been defended against Tom Wolfe's charge that its characteristic strategies "are merely decadent forms of self-absorption which deprive the novel of significant energy" (Currie, 17). Mark Currie has argued that a definition of metafiction as a borderline discourse between fiction and criticism "gives metafiction a central importance in the project of literary modernity, postmodernity and theory" (Currie, 2). Metafiction's value is that it derives an "energy" from its internalization of critical practice. Simultaneously of course, metafiction can be seen to valorize the practices of those who would seek to interpret it. Metafiction endorses and promotes the importance of the critic's role and the critic's professional skills. Even this convergence between creative activity and critical theory is valuable apparently, because in it we find "a succinct expression of the postmodern condition" (Currie, 5). Although metafiction has been around at least since Tristram Shandy (1759-67), it has a heightened value now, it has been argued, because in the postmodern period "The most authentic and honest fiction might well be that which most freely acknowledges its fictionality" (Hutcheon, 49). Metafiction's paradoxical "authenticity" lies in its readiness to confess and to advertise itself as fiction, to make a narrative virtue of self-analysis. In the late twentieth century, particularly, this willingness to concede the constructedness of texts led to a profusion of metafictional experiment and attention from critics who were informed by post-structuralist theories of the problem of language's referential dimension. If it is true that "Metafiction has enjoyed an international boom" (Hume, 286), it is because writers in the vanguard of creative innovation have been alert to those changes in the humanities contemporary with the advent of post-structuralism since the late 1960s. Post-structuralism's recognition of the contingent nature of all linguistic genres and modes (that paradigm shift or fundamental change in value ...