Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas [Hardcover]

Rick Moody (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2007

RIGHT LIVELIHOODS begins with a cataclysmic vision of New York City after the leveling of 50 square blocks of Manhattan. Four million have died. Albertine, the "street name for the buzz of a lifetime," is a mind-altering drug that sets The Albertine Notes in motion. The collection's second novella, K & K, concerns a lonely young office manager at an insurance agency, where the office suggestion box is yielding unpleasant messages that escalate to a scary pitch. Ellie Knight-Cameron's responses to these random diatribes illuminate the toll that a lack of self-awareness can take. At the center of The Omega Force is a buffoonish former government official in rocky recovery. Dr. "Jamie" Van Deusen is determined to protect his habitat--its golf courses (and Bloody Marys), pizza places (and beers) from "dark-complected" foreign nationals. His patriotism and wild imagination are mainly fueled by a fall off the wagon. Only Rick Moody could lead us to feel affection for this man and the other misguided, earnestly striving characters in these alternately unsettling, warm, trio of stories.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Rick Moody is off on a frolic of his own with these three very distinct novellas, different in content, style and character, but unmistakably Moody-esque. As in The Diviners and The Ice Storm, he deals with alienation, finding it everywhere he looks.

In the first novella, The Omega Force, we follow Dr. Jamie Van Deusen, a feckless former government official, from the time that he wakes up, disheveled and hungover on a neighbor's porch, through a vague, non-specific time wherein he decides that he must save his WASPy enclave from the invasion of "dark-complected" persons bent on destroying the animals on Plum Island. His alienation from his surroundings, fueled by alcohol, causes wild surmises to overtake him, and his imagination is reinforced by his reading of a thriller-diller: The Omega Force: Code White. This story is very funny, made even funnier by the arch and stilted language of Jamie, his utterly outlandish utterances to everyone he meets and his choice of wardrobe.

The second novella, K&K, is narrated by Ellie Knight-Cameron, lonely, disaffected office manager of an insurance company. She suddenly begins to find strange notes in the suggestion box. They grow progressively more profane as she conducts a search for the perpetrator. No one in the office has any time for her; indeed, no one has ever had any time for her. The inevitable ending falls flat, but it couldn't have happened any other way.

The third, and best novella is The Albertine Notes. Set in a post-apocalyptic New York where four million people have been killed by a bomb, the narrator is Kevin Lee, who is a Chinese-American journalist. He is on the trail of a hot story, trying to find the Zero user of Albertine, the street name for "the buzz of a lifetime." Trouble is, it doesn't guarantee only good memories. The story has its own internal logic, folding back upon itself again and again. No such thing as straight narrative. It is hard to follow at first, but well worth the trip. Moody's bleak vision of our world is writ large in this tale, and written very well. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly

Heavily influenced by post-9/11 paranoia, Moody's mostly successful trio of novellas pits its wayward characters against conspiracies sometimes entirely imagined. Dr. James Van Deusen, the loquacious, alcoholic, patently unreliable narrator of "The Omega Force," relies on his background in a "cabinet-level agency" and a mass market thriller to unravel a murky plot that, in his hobbled head, involves locals and a group of "dark-complected" individuals targeting the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. "K&K," the weakest of the three, takes the hidden tensions of a small insurance brokerage's office to an absurd level as office manager Ellie Knight-Cameron investigates a string of bizarre anonymous suggestions left in the office's suggestion box. Ellie's obsession isn't quite believable, and the novella ends abruptly, as if Moody gave up on it. "The Albertine Notes," the strongest piece in the book, describes a future New York after a dirty bomb destroys much of Manhattan. Kevin Lee fills his reporter's notebook for a story about the new drug of choice, Albertine, which transports users into their most pleasurable memories. Kevin succumbs to Albertine as well, and the layering of hallucination and reality that follows demonstrates why Moody has a reputation as a deft stylist. Two out of three ain't bad. (June)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (June 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316166340
• ISBN-13: 978-0316166348
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,663,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in NYC and raised in the CT suburbs. One of my grandfathers was a newspaper publisher and the other a small-town GM dealer. I figure this is a good lineage for a writer. I went to school in Rhode Island, where I worked with some really interesting people, like Angela Carter and John Hawkes. And then I got my MFA from Columbia University in NYC. After school I worked in book publishing in New York, during some lean times. My first novel came out in 1992. Since then, I've been writing mostly. I teach now and then. I got married in 2003, to my girlfriend of many years, Amy. She's working on her MA in decorative arts history. We split our time between Brooklyn and a little island off the coast of CT.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Trio Of Elegant Technologically-Obsessed Novellas Courtesy of Rick Moody, June 10, 2007

By 

John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas (Hardcover)

"Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas" demonstrates that Rick Moody remains at the peak of his literary craft, drawing successfully on post-9/11 paranoia in these three elegant examinations of technologically-obsessed paranoia. Included in this terse volume is the amazing "The Albertine Notes", the last of the three novellas in "Right Livelihoods", which deserves ample recognition and praise of its own (To which I shall return later.). The dysfunctional surburban families so eloquently depicted by Moody in his classic 1990s novel "The Ice Storm" and the recent short story collection "Demonology" are brilliantly transmutated into three engrossing portraits of three vivid characters each lost in their own peculiar set of technologically-oriented phobias. In short, at least two of these tales should be regarded as among Moody's best efforts in short fiction.

"The Omega Force" is a spellbinding examination of how one person's twisted notions of reality and fiction lead inexorably to an irrational speculation that unexpectedly disrupts the placid existence of his friends and neighbors in a bucolic North Shore Long Island community. Dr. Van Deusen, retired from some secret government agency, conflates fact with the "mind-twisting" fiction gleamed from the pages of the thriller "Omega Force", and his deep-seated fears about the arrival of "dark-complected" emigrants to his community. Convinced that he has uncovered the "truth", Dr. Van Deusen believes he's become a contemporary Paul Revere, fearful of some vague terrorist plot against the Plum Island animal research center, which, if successful, will unleash untold numbers of virulent diseases and plagues upon his community. In his typically riveting, expansive prose, Moody leads us on a personal trek through Dr. Van Deusen's swift descent into madness, in a compelling tale that many will regard as among his best, which concludes on a surprising, most unexpected, note. "The Omega Force" is written in a literary style which I find surprisingly similar to some of cyberpunk science fiction writer Bruce Sterling's work, most recently his post-9/11 novel, "The Zenith Angle".

"K&K", the second and shortest, of the three novellas, follows one Ellie Knight-Cameron, an administrative manager at Kolodny and Kolodny ("K&K"), a small insurance brokerage firm, as she deals with the unexpected arrivals of bizarre messages meant for her in the suggestion box she manages. She undergoes her own descent into madness, trying to cope not only with the arrival of these messages and their meanings, but also becoming obsessed into attempting to discover the identities of their senders. This is a fine tale in its own right, but one which may leave readers a bit unsatisfied, since it does end on a rather abrupt note.

With the last, and longest, of the three novellas, "The Albertine Notes", Rick Moody has boldly gone - with no pun intended, invoking a famous split infinitive whose artistic source some readers of this review may recognize - where few major mainstream fiction writers have gone before, writing what must be regarded as his most remarkable, most impressive work of short fiction to date. Relying once more on his characteristic expansive prose, Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes" is not just a fine short story, but a fine work of science fiction too, whose vivid imagery easily conjurs up references to Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard, and, I would argue too, paying homage to such classic American science fiction writers as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler in his intelligent depiction of race relations set in a dystopian near-future New York City; or rather, its surviving remnant, following a "suitcase nuke" nuclear detonation which has obliterated most of Manhattan south of 53rd Street, and exterminated four million of its residents. In "The Albertine Notes", Kevin Lee, a young Chinese-American journalist, searches for Albertine drug cartel chieftain Eduardo Cortez and traces the history of the drug "Albertine", an addictive mind-altering drug which appeared suddenly soon after "the blast", which allows its users to remember their past vividly, with ample clarity. Lee wrestles with his addiction and his vivid rememberance of things past, leading to a poignant, closing scene, which seems lifted straight from Greek mythology, as though Lee is Orpheus accompanying Charon, the ferryman, on a one-way trip to the Hades that is the nuclear wasteland of Manhattan. Lee takes us on a nocturnal, nightmarish trek across Brooklyn and Queens which is quite reminiscent of Delany's classic 1960s extraterrestrial urban dystopias like "Dhalgren" and "Nova", meeting prostitutes and bikers resembling those in Butler's novels and, in some respects, William Gibson's early classic cyberpunk novels too. "The Albertine Notes" is a most notable, memorable departure for Moody - and one that was recognized by its publication in a 2004 anthology of that year's best science fiction - which demonstrates his longstanding familiarity with and appreciation of science fiction - but one that is also a logical extension of his interest in dysfunctional suburban families as I have noted previously.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Witty, inventive, yet searing -- & searching for what's right, August 9, 2008

By 

John Domini (Des Moines, IA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas (Paperback)

Moody has contributed a number of glittering nuggets to our literature, and is best known for the more restrained early novels, made into movies. Yet in that longer form, I'd choose PURPLE AMERICA as his most feisty and moving, but after so enjoying my time with RIGHT LIVELIHOODS, I must put my shoulder behind the wheel of these three novellas. I'd characterize the set as a triangulated vision (triangulated, in keeping with the classic menage-a-trois for novellas, established by John Barth in CHIMERA) of groaning WASP America's ever-more-destructive looniness. This climaxes in "The Albertine Notes," a keening post-apocalyptic New York counterpoint to Proust's swooning recollection of his lost dream lover and, with her, of a collapsing European order. But literary references and a moral summary -- calling the work a search for a "right livelihood" in a fallen world -- does a disservice to the imagination and dramaturgy at play in "Notes," and in Moody's entire trio of catastrophes, always an entertaining skeleton-dance. The work seems one of those in which a rare talent has found a new way to his express his storytelling gift, and so to refresh his sensibility, and at the same time it vivifies anew the notion of the monitory artist, part hectoring Jeremiah and part head-over-heels jive artist, delivering dire warnings via belly laugh, rich personalities, and the skilled manipulation of surprises.

4.0 out of 5 stars Moody Blues, January 29, 2012

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Christopher Abbot "Vineyarder" (Oak Bluffs, MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas (Hardcover)

This collection of three novellas--actually two long short stories and one novella--is a series of explorations of voice. The different narratives (the first and third in the first person, the second in the third) each have a distinctive voice in which to communicate three very disparate stories.

The first story, "Omega Force," if judged solely by its title, should be some sort of Ludlum/Clancy-type of spy thriller; instead, its the darkly comic narrative of a dementia-bound septuagenarian who sees conspiracy in just about everything around him in his vacation home on a small island in Long Island Sound. This Dr. Van Deusen, a former State Department official, describes this uncovering of the grave terrorist threat to the East Coast that, strangely enough, follows the plot of the eponymous paperback he finds near his chaise longue when he wakes one morning on a porch that isn't his own. The comic series of misadventures that follows is both predictable and perfectly rendered.

"K & K" relates the mundane daily difficulties of Ellie Knight-Cameron, office manager to a small insurance company that seems to be skidding to insolvency. As the office intrigues mount, and various personnel depart, poor Ellie is preoccupied with a series of poison-pen notes that arrive in the suggestion box each week. The final denouement of the story is surprising and somehow hopeful.

The third piece, and the only story to merit the designation "novella," is a much darker and more complicated work. Titled "The Albertine Notes," it is an apocalyptic story that takes place in a near-future New York that has been devastated by a terrorist bomb that has destroyed much of Manhattan. The narrator is an erst-while writer in a society that doesn't read or write much; the populace at large seems to spend most of its time seeking a new memory aid called Albertine that offers a real-time experience of the past--and not the user's past, but apparently a past available from a variety of sources. Our narrator has been commissioned by his one source of income--a porn magazine that publishes literary pieces to give it some class ("tits and lit," as it's described)--to write an expose of the genesis of the drug. His descent into the netherworld of drug dealing and crime that is the only social control left in the city becomes a phantasmagoric series of scenes straight out of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." This story clearly points the way to Moody's next book, "The Four Fingers of Death.'

I'm not generally a fan of short story collections, but I can recommend this collection to anyone who admires Rick Moody. As usual, he offers something new and different to reckon with.