Book Review : ‘Livelihoods’ novellas explore paranoia
“Right Livelihoods”
by Rick Moody (Little, Brown & Co., 223 pages, $23.99)
“I began to cackle bizarrely,” cracks the cracked narrator near the end of “The Omega Force,” the first tale in Rick Moody’s new trilogy of surreal, surehanded novellas, “Right Livelihoods.”
All three deal with paranoia, with memory and reality, with sex and sorrow and loss.
These themes flared in 1992 in Moody”s first novel, “Garden State,” a wrenching story of drugs and despair. They have continued to burn in his works, including his two most recent: a complex and affecting memoir, “The Black Veil,” which artfully braids Moody’s biography with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and “The Diviners,” a serpentine satire of the TV industry with enough points of view to befuddle William Faulkner.
In “Omega,” the narrator – a retired bureaucrat named Van Deusen living on an exclusive island in Long Island Sound – believes that some “dark-complected persons” spotted on the local airstrip are plotting a terrorist attack.
Confusing reality with a novel he finds, “Omega Force: Code White,” Van Deusen is caught in a maelstrom of madness that deposits him on a beach, where, bewildered, he dances.
In “K & K,” the second novella, Moody explores the fragile reality of Ellie Knight-Cameron, an employee of Kolodny and Kolodny, a small insurance brokerage in Stamford, Conn.
In the company’s suggestion box, someone is leaving unsigned notes that are growing ever more ominous. As her world dissolves, Ellie tries to identify the mysterious messenger.
“K & K,” though an amusing, edged satire, is the weakest of the three. Its final twist won’t surprise many.
The title and content of the final novella, “The Albertine Notes,” allude to Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” that unparalleled sequence of novels about time and memory whose narrator develops a paranoid possessiveness of Albertine, his young lover.
In Moody’s tale, “Albertine” is the street name of a popular drug in post-apocalyptic New York.
“Take just a little into your bloodstream, and any memory you’ve ever had is available to you all over again,” says the narrator.
The narrator is Kevin Lee, a writer who survived the nuclear detonation that killed 3.5 million people and transformed Manhattan into a wasteland. The Statue of Liberty is gone, as is half the Brooklyn Bridge.
Lee is researching an article about Albertine, but, as he discovers while spiraling down the vortex of the drug underworld, “Chasing the story of Albertine was to chase time itself, and time guarded its secrets.”
Moody ends with a dazzling description of a ruined city, its air throbbing with a spectral symphony of polyglot voices demanding to be heard.
These novellas are cautionary and satirical, cerebral and literary, and feature characters who are introspective, confused, hopeful and hopeless, doomed.
Moody is a master at showing that looking too closely into reality’s mirror will reveal a constellation of cracks.