Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas Rick Moody Books Review

How do you keep suspense alive when you open a story with an atomic blast? It's something that addicts of the high-tension television series "24" asked themselves earlier this year when, on the second night of the new season, a suitcase nuke exploded in California, releasing a mushroom cloud over Valencia. As the next episodes unfolded, the audience wrestled with an uneasy concept: a nuclear strike isn't the end of the world - that is, not for its survivors. For the purposes of dramatic fiction, at least, the bomb was just a starting shot that set off a mad dash for security and compromise, a race no human would want to run, given the choice.

Skip to next paragraph Alex Robbins

RIGHT LIVELIHOODS Three Novellas.

By Rick Moody.

223 pp. Little, Brown & Company. .99.

Rick Moody pulls a similar stunt in his latest book, "Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas." A master of laconic revelation, Moody typically underplays the drama that accompanies the hopes and disappointments of middle-class lives. In much of his writing, menace comes from mundane sources like the "ruinous sheen" of the drizzle in the skies above New Jersey, and the ticking time bomb of suburban ennui is set off by self-loathing. But in "The Albertine Notes," the third and longest novella in "Right Livelihoods," he starts with a shocker that could come from a future season of "24": a suitcase bomb has laid waste to Lower Manhattan.

Tompkins Square Park was a junkies' wasteland in the '80s; in the '90s, it was revived. But in "The Albertine Notes," it's gone - along with the city skyline. New Yorkers wear gas masks on the Kosciusko Bridge to protect themselves from noxious fumes. "People just turned their backs on Manhattan," Moody writes. "They forgot about that island, which was the center of nothing, except maybe the center of society ladies with radiation burns crowding the trauma units at the remaining hospitals. Manhattan was just landfill now."

On "24," such calamities are met with heroic pronouncements and redoubled resolve, but Moody's tale takes place in a hero-free zone. New Yorkers react to the attack with passivity and denial, applying their energies (such as they are) to avoiding thinking about the catastrophe. Both the small screen of "24" and the printed page of Moody's fiction confound expectations by showing that the most potent fallout is emotional, not atomic. What holds the audience hostage is the rubbernecking impulse: curiosity about how these characters will fare in the aftermath of the blow.

As always, the battlefield that interests Moody is interior. Barely possessing the fight to make a fist, his disheartened survivors sedate themselves with a drug called Albertine (a just-for-the-sake-of-it nod to Proust). For 25 bucks a pop, Albertine sinks its users into a consoling stupor, allowing them to relive visions of life before the blast - a first kiss, a concert, even a moment of sexual betrayal - that had been searing, perhaps, but not radioactive.

At the story's outset, Albertine abuse has reached epidemic proportions. As in "The Plague," the novella takes the form of a record kept by a man who observes the epidemic at first hand. Kevin Lee, a gifted, upper-middle-class Chinese-American touchily introduces himself by saying that he's "third generation, which doesn't mean my dad worked in a delicatessen to get me into M.I.T. It means my father was an I.T. venture capitalist and my mother was a microbiologist." Kevin didn't go to M.I.T.; he went to (and dropped out of) Fordham. And as he attempts to retrace the origins of Albertine for the reader, his hunt for the woman who gave it her name veers into a surreal maze of conspiracies linked to identity, memory and time.

Like the narrator of a segment of "This American Life," Kevin builds empathy with sauntering stealth. The Albertine fiends aren't losers, he argues; they're people very much like you. "When you're used to living a comfortable middle-class life, when you're used to going to the organic farmers' market on the weekend, maybe a couple of dinners out at that new Indian place, you're bound to become very uncomfortable when 50 square blocks of your city suddenly look like a NASA photo of Mars. You're bound to look for some relief when you're camped in a school gymnasium pouring condensed milk over government-issued cornflakes." It's Moody's genius to know that the horror of a nuclear blast is hardly conceivable - but condensed milk? Now there's something to cry over.

Moody wrote "The Albertine Notes" as an experiment in genre fiction at the behest of Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon, who edited the edition of Eggers's magazine that became the anthology "McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales." The fact that these three writers would not only support one another but set one another tasks is a heartening sign of artistic altruism. Their cooperative impulse is a stroke of luck for readers.

The first novella in "Right Livelihoods," a dark comic fugue called "The Omega Force," owes a debt to yet another literary friendship. Written in memory of the late Paris Review editor George Plimpton at the request of some of his former colleagues, it's set on a resort island in Long Island Sound and tells the story of a cantankerous retired government official named Dr. Van Deusen, who (to be blunt) is losing his marbles. Dignified, stubborn and screwy, Van Deusen scours the skies and the beach plum for evidence of terrorist attack, obsessed by delusions that "dark-complected" assailants will soon be invading. Aware that others (including his wife) consider his behavior erratic and may deprive of him of his freedom, he stubbornly persists in his manic explorations, like a dog that lunges into alien yards even as he senses the warden's approach.

1 2 Next Page »

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.