Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas (Hardcover)

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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 (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #718,593 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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12 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 (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"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 (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a "lay" review written for common, ordinary folk like myself, June 28, 2007

By	Rhonda K. Bridges "Why me?" (Panama City, FL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Let's say I'm coerced to pick one word to describe RIGHT LIVELIHOODS (or ANY book by Rick Moody). That word would be "rain". Not floodwaters that rise over your head and wash you away. Smooth, still, tranquilizing rain. Melancholic without being too depressing. Sober, REAL. The three novellas in RIGHT LIVELIHOODS are so real and intrinsic that I read each one in its entirety before putting down the book.
I need good books to help me escape my depressed self. A "good book" embraces me instead of vice versa. It moves me to relax my troubled mind. My soul is engulfed by it and I can step into another life. I can have a different name, a different heritage, a different past. I can have sundry worries and diverse dreams. A good book leaves me feeling woebegone when it ends and sends me back to myself. It returns me to an apathetic world after giving me a day full of sighs and smiles and perhaps even tears and laughter. Thus, it leaves me feeling more discomposed than as it found me. Yes, a good book finds ME. I don't have enough good luck nor common sense to find the good ones. Somehow, they meander into my life, usually by recommendation. Once in my life, they influence and transform me. They improve me. They don't make me happy, very little does. But they do make me THINK. They compel me to ponder, to reflect, to fantasize.
RIGHT LIVELIHOODS is a good book. (ALL Rick Moody books are GREAT books!) RIGHT LIVELIHOODS shares with us the foolhardy shenanigans of an adorable Dr. "Jamie" Van Deusen in the novella "The Omega Force". It shares with us the delusional reality of a mousy perfectionist Ellie Knight-Cameron in "K & K". And introduces us to a likable, downtrodden Kevin Lee and to a wonderful illicit drug called Albertine in "The Albertine Notes".
I can't imagine a reader not instantly befriending these characters. One would have to be indifferent to decent literature in order to remain detached. I fell in love with them.
So, should you read this book? Yes, indubitably. It's a good book, friends. Don't just take my word for it. Read it and experience it. Let it affect you too.