Despite cherished progenitors like Ernest
Hemingway’s THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA and Philip
Roth’s GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, the novella is not a literary form
that has attracted the interest of many American writers. Among
contemporary authors, Jim Harrison (LEGENDS OF THE FALL) is perhaps
the only one working consistently in the form. The principal danger
is that, poorly handled, the work can feel either like a padded
short story or an underdeveloped novel. In RIGHT LIVELIHOODS, Rick
Moody has avoided that pitfall, providing a trio of unsettling
tales united by the theme of paranoia that runs like an electric
current through them.

“The Omega Force” leads off the collection, and
it’s the most mordantly humorous of the three stories. Its
protagonist is Dr. James (“Jamie”) Van Deusen, an
alcoholic retired federal bureaucrat and heir to a mattress
fortune, who awakens on a neighbor’s porch with a pulp
thriller entitled OMEGA FORCE: CODE WHITE beside him on
the chaise lounge where he has spent the night. When a fisherman
tells him about a small plane carrying some
“dark-complected” persons that has landed on the
airstrip of the island in Long Island Sound (where the story takes
place), Van Deusen begins to ascribe sinister meanings to even the
most routine events. Soon he is conflating those events with scenes
from the novel, imagining that a terrorist force is about to wreak
havoc on the island and its mostly upscale inhabitants. Although
Moody gives the story his own unique twist, the atmosphere and
characters are reminiscent of the work of John Cheever, territory
Moody has visited in his novel THE ICE STORM.

Of the three tales, “K&K” is the one most firmly
grounded in a recognizable reality --- and perhaps for that reason
the slightest --- the offices of a small insurance brokerage in
Stamford, Connecticut. Ellie Knight-Cameron, the office manager, is
a 34-year-old single woman who is “orderly in her habits and
in her thinking.” One of her duties is the maintenance of the
office suggestion box, a former tissue box she has wrapped in
bright pink paper and that up to now has contained nothing more
substantial than a complaint about the office's flavored
coffee.

But one day, Ellie opens the box to find a profane suggestion about
maintenance on the nearby Merritt Parkway, followed by increasingly
bizarre anonymous notes culminating with the most ominous one of
all: “All of you should be lined up and shot.” With
each new note, Ellie becomes suspicious of another of her
co-workers, invoking various means to find the culprit. When those
same co-workers gradually begin to leave the agency one by one,
Ellie has to consider whether there is an even darker explanation
for the disturbing communications.

In the Acknowledgements to RIGHT LIVELIHOODS, Moody credits Dave
Eggers and Michael Chabon, whose assignment to write a genre story
yielded the final piece, “The Albertine Notes.” The
longest of the three works, it’s a mind-bending dystopian
fantasy that takes place in New York City after half the city has
been eradicated by a uranium bomb. Kevin Lee is a writer who has
been assigned by a pornographic literary magazine to investigate a
new drug called “Albertine.” As Lee describes it,
“Take just a little into your bloodstream and any memory
you’ve ever had is available to you all over again. That and
more. Not a memory like you’ve experienced it
before…No, the actual event itself, completely renewed,
playing in front of you like you were experiencing it for the first
time.”

Lee’s investigation leads him into the underworld of a crime
syndicate that’s controlling the supply of the drug, and he
encounters the leaders of the Resistance plotting to undermine what
turn out to be its devastating effects. The plot is complex and
convoluted, looping and swirling like the phenomenon of memory
itself. What the author has done in an original way is to cause us
to ask ourselves what price we’d be willing to pay to fully
relive our memories.

In RIGHT LIVELIHOODS, Rick Moody demonstrates forcefully why he is
among the more intriguing figures in contemporary American fiction.
He has taken a relatively obscure form and reinvigorated it in
these three stories, perhaps throwing down a challenge to other
writers to join him in exploring its possibilities.