Moody blues

>> Rick Moody’s Right Livelihoods promises to fill shelves but not long-term memories

by JULIET WATERS

Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas is a good summer read for a particular kind of reader. I’m thinking of the hyperliterate kind who enjoys a quiet chuckle over concepts like a post-apocalyptic street drug named Albertine that enables users to access their fondest memories. Readers who have heard of Philip K. Dick, but prefer Marcel Proust. My best guess, however, is that Rick Moody’s recent collection of three novellas will find a place in many summer cottage bookcases, but not in too many long-term memories.

Rick Moody is, obviously, not a bad writer. Still, I have some sympathy for Dale Peck, the critic who once famously called Moody “the worst writer of his generation.” Re-reading that review, I found it a little less snarky than I remembered. In his meta-critique of Moody’s meta-memoir, Peck struggled to honour his intuition and avoid the standard review practice of damning with faint praise. He decided instead to declare, quite simply, that he hates Moody’s writing.

I don’t have a problem damning with faint praise. But there’s something to be said for standing up for your gut instincts as a critic. I admire Moody’s brilliance, but in all honesty, I don’t connect with him, and I suspect very few readers really do. Sift through other reviews and you’ll find a few hard-core devoted admirers, but you’ll find a lot more critics who praise Moody’s courage in taking risks even when they don’t pan out, who admire his brilliance even when it’s uneven etc. Increasingly, Moody seems to be propped up more by literary cheerleaders than solid success.

In fact, one (and arguably two) of these novellas seems to have been coaxed into being by literary coaches. According to Moody, “The Albertine Notes” was written to satisfy a direct challenge from McSweeney’s to write a piece of genre fiction. Another novella, “The Omega Force,” tells the story of an aging, neurologically impaired preppy who wanders from backyard to backyard of his summer beach resort. Struck by some strong similarities to the John Cheever classic “The Swimmer,” I did some googling and came up with an interview a few years back. Rick Moody speaks about another challenge McSweeney’s threw at him. He was asked to do a “cover” of a famous American short story. McSweeney’s chose the Sherwood Anderson classic “The Egg,” and Moody was relieved because he “was really worried that they might choose something obvious [like] ‘The Swimmer’.”

This effort to distance himself from Cheever, while consciously, or unconsciously, re-writing his most famous story, is particularly weird since for much of his career Moody seems to have bristled at comparisons to Cheever. Stories by Connecticut WASPs about Connecticut WASPs don’t have the market they used to (just ask Ben Cheever, the sadly underrated son). It’s understandable that Moody would want to focus more on his NYC urban persona. Unfortunately, that persona doesn’t serve him as well. The narrator in “The Albertine Notes,” a former reporter for an alternative weekly until “the offices of the newspaper, all of its owners, a large percentage of its shareholders and nine-tenths of its reporting staff were incinerated,” doesn’t quite ring true. Moody seems to be implying that they were all under one roof, which in this day and age of corporate conglomeration and filing from home would be unlikely. But even if they weren’t, this is an astonishingly glib summation of major grief, even for a journalist Moody clearly considers a hack. “K&K,” the middle story about a young woman in a small insurance brokerage, is not much more than filler between the two other novellas.

Of the three, “The Omega Force” has the most vitality. It’s a little difficult at times to feel affection for his loopy, bigoted, brain damaged narrator, but you can’t help laughing at his paranoid vision of terrorists camouflaging themselves in the hideous greens and pinks of a Lilly Pulitzer trunk show.

If Moody’s planning to grow as a writer, though, he might do best by sticking to his roots.

Right Livelihoods by Rick Moody,
Little Brown, hc, 224pp, $29.99