PURPLE AMERICA.<i> By Rick Moody</i> .<i> Little, Brown: 298 pp., $23.95</i>

“Purple America,” is a robust book. It is a book whose capacious arms reach up out of the bold second sentence--four pages long and surprisingly assured--to embrace a striking range of thought, memory and feeling. These arms manage to grasp people longing and people loving; people seeking and people struggling; people in deep distress, both physical and psychological; and people inhabiting a land that is in its own distress--a land that is purple the way storm clouds are purple and nuclear explosions are purple, yet also the way mountains wear this hue, with purple majesty. The themes Moody has taken on in this, his third novel (following “Garden State” and “The Ice Storm”), never lack ambition. They may not always be seamlessly integrated into his storytelling but, at its best, the storytelling is energetic enough to propel the reader through a remarkable weekend in the life of Moody’s hero, the blighted and beleaguered Hex Raitliffe.

“Purple America” captures the world in a day, specifically Hex’s world, on an early November weekend, Friday afternoon to Saturday morning. Moody’s paradigm is a staple of American letters: the grown child, typically a son, returning to the scene of his boyhood and youth to confront or comprehend some troubling aspect of his past. In Hex’s case, past and present are intertwined in the person of his ailing mother, Billie Raitliffe, who is suffering from a degenerative neurological disease in suburban Fenwick, Conn. Confined to her wheelchair or bed, losing control over her bowels, her bladder and her speech--but never her spirit--Billie is abandoned on this Friday afternoon by her caretaker and Hex’s step-father, Lou Sloane. She summons Hex home and, speaking through the computer she uses to communicate, asks him to help her end her life when the time comes that she can no longer operate the keyboard and is rendered, therefore, completely mute.

Hex, properly Dexter, Raitliffe is ill-equipped to help his mother face this critical juncture. Stuttering and alcoholic, Hex lives up to his nickname, which he arrived at in his youth through a piece of verbal circumnavigation, the letter “h” tripping him up far less than the letter “d.” A trust-fund kid who grew up to be an ineffectual publicist, Hex was hexed, it seems, virtually from birth: He was an overweight child with a speech impediment who lost his father when he was 10, tried to commit suicide when he was in college and still retains, at 37, an adolescent capacity for self-indulgence crossed with an ageless capacity for self-sabotage. Moody audaciously sets this afflicted figure in the most morally and psychologically challenging of contexts: the moment in life where a man’s deepest manhood is assayed and he must discover whether he can care for a dying parent, even it that care means bringing about a parent’s death.

This charged domestic crisis is interleaved with a mechanical crisis at the nearby Millstone Nuclear Power Station, where Lou Sloane, a devoted company man for the last 15 years, has taken the fall for some euphemistically termed “emissions” that have leaked into both the Atlantic Ocean and the New London press. Before fleeing his former life entirely, Lou attends a farewell party at the plant, where an even more significant contamination develops. Unfortunately, the symbolic parallel Moody draws between these two troubled nuclear families, Raitliffe and Millstone, is heavy-handed and his meticulous detailing of the literal nuclear crisis lacks the humanizing dimensions that so distinguish his writing when the Raitliffes come before his lens.

The Millstone passages are at their most alive when Moody enters Lou’s mind and renders a believably sympathetic portrait of a man who abandons his ailing wife. We are told that Lou married Billie knowing that she was sick and would grow sicker still because she had a face “all chiseled with wisdom, smarts, heartache, all beautiful like a flock of birds scared up off the cove, all beautiful like the sound of cellos, all beautiful like the morning after a first snowfall, all beautiful with a life fully lived.” Moody builds up this affecting connection and then unravels it again as Lou concludes that he “wasn’t guilty for surviving and being vigorous” and that “it was all right to leave.” Whether a man of such fine, indeed refined, feeling will stay away is one of the psychologically suspenseful questions that animate a novel where the plot in the foreground is ultimately quite simple.

Moody takes a similar approach to the evening’s parallel action, Hex’s ministering to Billie. As he bathes and dresses his mother and takes her out to dinner, these relatively undramatic events are opened up by Moody’s rich excursions into Hex’s past and inner life and even richer excursions into the past and inner life of Billie, who is the novel’s most vivid and poignant figure. Locked into the capsule of her enfeebled body, Billie is nonetheless deeply dimensional, a woman who loved two husbands, mothered devotedly and has succeeded in remaining intact, in spirit and in psyche, despite her devastating illness. Early on in the novel, Moody sets the tone for this portrait by capturing a key piece of Billie’s thinking: “If there is in her no evidence of any perceptible language, who is to blame for that? If perception is required for language, well then, it’s a pretty faulty design. Inside her, language dances on. As does memory.”

Indeed language, the difficulty and complexity of expression, emerges as one of the novel’s running motifs. Moody cleverly pairs the stuttering Hex with the near-mute Billie, two crippled speakers who are charged with conducting the most significant conversation of their lives. And the language they use, like the language of the wider novel, is a stellar accomplishment, highly textured and deftly shifting between omniscient and first-person narration. Moody creates voices that are intimate and others that are distant. He dispenses with quotation marks entirely and combines prose and dialogue in a rich verbal soup, much varied by the use of italics, em dashes and ellipses. Many of his sentences are long and operatic, great gusts of language that sweep the mincing phrases of minimalism into the high dusty reaches of some linguistic attic.

Inevitably, too, there is the language of romance. When Hex takes Billie out to dinner, he meets Jane Ingersoll, a girl he once longed for in his youth. A savvy, motorcycle-riding single mother with punkish green hair, Jane is, at first, far from charmed by Hex’s dishevelment, drinking and naive pick-up conversation, but when Billie suddenly appears to have a seizure, Jane finds herself pitching in and helping Hex out. Although tending to the urine-soiled Billie would seem an unlikely catalyst for love, Jane is seasoned enough to recognize that “romance is bad interior lighting, convenience stores, bowling on the league nights, seaside towns in winter, empty main streets. Romance is in the hearts of people who have abandoned romance. It thrives best in rooms like this, single-occupancy ladies’ rooms where women give up the ghost.”

And so Jane joins the cast of characters who inhabit this long, dark Connecticut night. A woman of experience and feeling, she makes a touching mother-to-mother connection to Billie, and her growing attraction to Hex--the flawed Hex, whom she resists improving in her imagination--remains credible, at least up to their desperately sad sexual encounter. Here, when Hex is revealed at his most disturbed, Jane’s empathy begins to verge on the improbable.

This is, in fact, one of the first moments the reader slips out from under the spell of Moody’s narrative and begins to wonder some about Hex, this man who needs to tie up a woman in order to become aroused by her. Our wondering accelerates as the novel reaches its conclusion, which seems too melodramatically drawn for a book where actions and states of mind are otherwise so painstakingly depicted. While no one would expect a movie-of-the-week disquisition on euthanasia from so nuanced a writer, there is a hastiness to the book’s last laps that feels disjunctive. Partly this is caused by the way Moody loops around the critical moment, leading the reader to it from different angles, but the more fundamental cause seems to be Hex himself.

Surprisingly, given the amount of time we spend in his company, Hex’s parts never completely congeal into the necessary whole. While it is true that his father died when he was young, Hex has such a loving and, in many ways, superior mother that one questions why he emerged from his childhood as damaged as he did. And there are gaps. We never quite see into Hex’s past with the emotional acuity we see into the other characters’ pasts--the period between his late adolescence and his late 30s is mostly blank for example, as is the entire complexion of his present life in New York. Moody is so infatuated with Hex’s downward drunken spiral that he doesn’t entirely penetrate the man doing the falling. He relies instead on the hexed aspects of Hex, the more symbolic origins of his distress. Prominent among these is the fact that his father helped develop nuclear weapons during the war. Father and stepfather both with nuclear careers? It is one of the book’s more awkward thematic pairings.

In countless other ways, though, “Purple America” remains an original and reverberative novel. In Billie Raitliffe, Lou Sloane and Jane Ingersoll, and in many of the elements that constellate anguished Hex Raitliffe, Rick Moody presents people at key moments of transition in their complicated quests for love, freedom, maturity and death. In this long night’s journey into day, Moody delivers a suburban America where a prolonged adolescence is challenged with facing adulthood and comes up markedly, but movingly, short.