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Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas

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"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.

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.

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.

Reviewed by Joanne Benham (6/07)


In the first story, "The Omega Force," we meet Dr. Jaime Van Deusen, a retired civil servant living on the small island of South Beach, an isolated enclave of the wealthy. He wakes up one morning on a neighbor's loggia, a paperback book called `The Omega Force: Code One' lying next to him. With no memory of why he was sleeping on the loggia; indeed, he doesn't even know on whose loggia he's sleeping, his keen brain makes an immediate leap to espionage. After all, the clues are all in the book and he gets other clues from a U.S. spy, cleverly disguised as a fisherman. Realizing that certain `dark-complected' foreign nationals are planning to overrun his island home, Jaime sets out to single-handedly save it from that terrible fate.

Told in the ramblings of a drunken man, I kept waiting for Jaime to be vindicated, hoping that he would find his `dark-complected' foreign nationals and save his home and family.

The second story is "K & K," a thoroughly boring read about the goings-on of a small insurance company. With only eleven employees on the payroll of Kolodny and Kolodny, Ellie Knight-Cameron figured it wouldn't take much effort to track down the writer of the totally inappropriate suggestions placed in the company suggestion box. The story follows her as she tracks down lead after lead, even going so far as to stake out the home of one of the employees, as she stubbornly pursues her quest. The parallels to Jamie Van Deusen's story are obvious; although Ellie's mental instability is not caused by drinking.

The third installment in the book is "The Albertine Notes," a story about the aftermath of a catastrophe that has leveled fifty square blocks of Manhattan, and left four million dead. Albertine is a mind-altering drug, capable of producing enhanced memory, where you not only remember past events, you actually relive them down to the smallest detail. Albertine was also capable of giving certain select individuals the ability to see into the future.

The story follows Kevin Lee, a magazine reporter assigned to write a story about the history of Albertine, as he tracks down leads, interviews people and tries desperately to understand and explain the power of Albertine. In this story, the mental instability is of course caused by the drug.

Again, I was disappointed with the story, literally forcing myself to finish it.

Book received free of charge.

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.

The first story was simply hard to finish. Seemingly without a purpose. I found myself not caring what was happening and just wanting to get through it.

The second story started out much more interesting but ended with a disappointing thud.

The third story is the very best of the three, but honestly its not worth buying the book just for the third work.

Sorry to be such a downer, but I had high hopes for this. The reviewers in recent magazines must owe the author something, or were just being nice.

Who says summer reading can't be significant lit. Who says significant lit can't be fun! Every sentence is packed with meaning.