Dexter "Hex" Raitliffe is a hapless 38-year-old freelance publicist with a serious speech impediment and a heavy drinking habit who returns home to tend Billie, his dying mother. This is a big, ambitious novel in which Moody explores what happens when the child-parent dependency is reversed. He begins with a long, theatrical address to the reader on the unnatural physical intimacy created by illness. The character of Billie, deserted by her ridiculous second husband, is by far the best-drawn in the book. Moody confers the incapacitated woman, who no longer even cry, much less speak, move or eat, with a glamorous past life in which she was the model wife and mother presiding over a perfect home. How exactly Hex emerged as such a mess considering his advantages is just one of the many inconsistencies of the book. There are moments of black comedy, but Moody, and this novel, repeatedly suffer by the obvious comparisons with Updike and Cheever.
