Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas

by Rick Moody

Book Overview

From the author of The Ice Storm, who has been lauded as the gutsiest writer of his generation (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), comes three sublime novellas about yearning.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316166340
• ISBN13: 9780316166348
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Witty, inventive, yet searing -- & searching for what's right

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.

3 great novelas

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

a "lay" review written for common, ordinary folk like myself

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.

A Trio Of Elegant Technologically-Obsessed Novellas Courtesy of Rick Moody

"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