Dexter Raitliffe, alias Hex, returns to his mother's bedside to confront an angry, sick woman who questions the value of her living if her quality of life has been reduced to such a low level. Her husband, Lou Sloane, has just left after deciding himself that he could no longer cope with caring for the bedridden woman who suffers from a degenerative nervous system disease. Billie Raitliffe can only communicate with the aid of a computer and voice synthesizing software, however she rarely avails herself of this technology accept to write a letter asking that she be allowed to die. Hex's father died young in mysterious circumstances and we are given an intimation that this may have had something to do with his presence at the scene of a nuclear accident while serving in the U.S. Army. Purple America is the story of a day in the life of the Raitliffe family in a time of crisis, a time affected in the past and the present by the specter of nuclear weapons and nuclear generated power.

It's pretty incoherent what she's saying, it's syllabic puree, but the scariest thing is that he understands her now. Perfectly. Couple of drinks and he knows exactly what she's saying. He holds her like a rag doll, lifting her back up into the chair, turning her to face the computer again. And then he works the keyboard.

As fate would have it, when they go out for dinner to a local restaurant, Hex meets the woman he spent his adolescence fantasizing about. What is an unlikely occasion for meeting someone, Hex reacquaints himself with Jane Ingersol and she is drawn into the imbroglio of the next twenty four hours. At the same time they learn of an accident at the local nuclear power plant where Lou Sloane has just worked his last shift.

-It's not too bad, really, it's around ten gallons an hour of gain. Less than one percent above capacity, I figure. And part of the overflow is running into the secondary tank, that's fine, but there's this leak there, too, and that part is running into a sump that cleans out the secondary tank, and that coolant in turn would be leaking into- -Groundwater, Lou Sloane said.

What might sound like an implausible confluence of events is in fact an excellent pretext for examining some of the fallout on humanity, if you'll pardon the pun, of the testing of nuclear weapons and the generation of nuclear energy. Hex attempts to form a relationship with Jane during these strange circumstances while also looking for his stepfather, who he believes has deserted his mother. This leads to a minor catastrophe covering almost the entire human spectrum of catastrophic events. It is twentyfour hours that compel our attention and connect events that might otherwise remain unconnected. Purple America is an admirable work, courageous in its ambition and adroit in its execution.