Right Livelihoods
By Rick Moody
Little, Brown, 223 pages, $23.99
Right livelihood, Buddhists tell us, refers to the good work we try to do on Earth. Although a certain writer-critic — That memorable guy, what was his name? — once called Rick Moody the worst writer of his generation, it’s quite indisputable that Moody’s livelihood has been going well these past few years, what with his spectacular satire on the movie business, “The Diviners,” that preceded this new book, and this new one itself, which is his subtlest and most darkly comical performance yet.
The title novella, “The Omega Force,” mimics that of a cheap paperback thriller that Dr. Van Deusen, the main character, a retired government official drying out on an exclusive New England off-shore habitat, has picked up as he awakes after a night of brain-debilitating boozing. The story comes to us in Van Deusen’s voice, a slightly off-key and somewhat stilted voice (“Memory is an inconsistent retrieval system, as anyone will tell you”), but still the self-important ramblings of a man who once knew Important people (“Did I not report directly to Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare Caspar W. Weinberger during the presidential administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford?”).
Reading Moody’s simulation of the man’s voice is like watching someone trying to run a 100-yard dash in flip-flops. (Although Van Deusen is actually wearing “red poplin shorts, beige socks, and,” as he puts it, “the shoe popularly known as the Docksider.”) After peeking into the paperback, the narrator comes to believe he has discovered a terrorist plot in his own backyard, a plot in which almost everyone on the island is playing a part and concocted out of race hate, alienation and the delusion popularly known as paranoia.
“K & K,” the second novella, portrays another mind in decline. An office manager at a small Connecticut insurance office, Ellie Knight-Cameron, an unloved and unlovable company bureaucrat, is trying to find the source of some nasty notes (“You ought to throw this . . . coffee machine out the window and run over it with a car,” is one of them) in the suggestion box at the offices of Kolodny & Kolodny. The story of her increasingly deluded quest for the note writer comes with diagrams of the office work flow and a window on her fast-disintegrating sense of reality. Alas, it offers the smallest payoff (as Bernard Malamud used to call the bold effects of a story) of the three pieces here.
“The Albertine Notes,” the third piece in the collection, more than makes up for the middle-of-the-book slump. It is, I want to shout this out, a triumphant work of speculative prose. In the wake of an attack with a dirty bomb on Lower Manhattan, city residents by the millions are rapidly becoming addicted to a new drug called Albertine. A mixture of addictive substances, tranquilizers and mind enhancers, the drug both heightens memory function — so users can live in the past and don’t have to face up to the utterly dismal and hopeless present of an obliterated New York (“Soho is gone, the former CBGB, New York University if gone, Zeckendorf Towers gone, Union Square Park is gone . . . the Empire State Building is gone. . . .”) — and at the same time obliterates memory itself in a tsunami of recollection.
A Chinese-American freelance magazine writer named Kevin Lee tells the story of the rise of Albertine as he tells his own story about trying to write a piece about the substance and its effects. The closer he gets to the main dealer, the deeper into a hallucinogenic conspiracy he gets. At the center of Kevin’s story — in fact, calling up the story — is the drug itself, which is, Kevin convinces us, a powerful stew of all things remembered. “Albertine” he writes after he injects a dose, “was like a soup of NYC neon. She was a catalogue of demonic euphonies.”
Memory inside of memory inside of memory, the world according to Albertine is both delusion and truth at the same time. The narrator of the first novella called memory “an inconsistent retrieval system.” In “The Albertine Notes” we hear a different view. “Memory’s the groove,” Kevin writes. “It’s the all-stars laying down their groove, and it’s you dancing, chasing the desperations of the heart, chasing something that’s so gone, so ephemeral you know it only by its traces, how a certain plucked guitar string summons the thundering centuries, how a taste of fresh cherries calls up the indolent romancers on antebellum porches, all these stories of the past rolling around in you. Memory is the groove, the lie, the story you never get right, the better place. Memory is the bitch, the shame factory, the curse, and the consolation.”
Passages such as this make Rick Moody’s work quite unforgettable.
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Alan Cheuse is a book commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” a writing teacher at George Mason University and the author, most recently, of the short-story collection “Lost and Old Rivers.”
