Rick Moody has the type of devoted following that awaits each new work with huge anticipation. We await gorgeous language and raw intelligence, astute social commentary and characters who haunt their readers long after the volume has been shelved. But readers as devoted as myself anticipate the latest Moody for another reason as well: to see which tack the guy might dare to take.

My first Moody ever was The Ice Storm (1994), which I read before I turned from academia to writing full-time, before I had the first of my three children (and long before I saw Ang Lee’s artful adaptation). The incisive and damning depiction of suburbia in the 1970’s appealed to me in part because I was a kid when Paul and Wendy Hood were kids. No one in my family of origin was having key parties, but more than a few flowing caftans entered our Northern California home. From a suburban Connecticut that was eerily familiar, though, I—seduced by language that echoed my thoughts as had only Virginia Woolf before (despite significant differences in style)—I backtracked to Moody’s first novel, Garden State (1992), which had won him the Pushcart Editor’s Choice Award. The Hoods’ Connecticut gave way to a grittier, younger, even darker geography that offered a valuable counterpoint to my own suburban and suddenly maternal existence as the new mother of an infant. It was Demonology (2001) that I shoved hurriedly into the diaper bag after the birth of my second child, the collection of short fiction serving as some kind of intellectual talisman against stultifying marathon afternoons at the park. Demonology diverged from the ennui and despair of Garden State to offer up a variety of divergent structures and topoi including a farcical vision of the American wedding industry, a catalogue of Moody’s bookshelf replete with commentary, and an incredibly well-wrought, indelible story depicting the death of Moody’s sister. The Black Veil (2002) saw me through very wee hours after the birth of my third baby. Moody’s oeuvre had offered up sufficient variation for the unusual Hawthorne digressions—this memoir unlike any Moody work before it—to delight me with their admixture of academic and highly personal revelation. Somewhere along the line I read Purple America (1997). Almost immediately, I read it again. Hex Raitliffe—alcoholic, lonely, foundering—couldn’t have been more different, and appealing for that very reason, from my day-in day-out. I sought Moody’s short fiction in lit mags; I loved the more abstract pieces that accompanied compilations of Gregory Crewdson’s stunning and unsettling photography; I ferreted out Moody’s incisive essays on the fiction of Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, W. G. Sebald, and his biblical commentary in Joyful Noise: the New Testament Revisited (1997). September of 2005, the man delivered up something else again: the sprawlingly fabulous ultra-American panoply that is The Diviners.

It’s thus unsurprising that after I received the electronic notice that Right Livelihoods had shipped from Powell’s in the middle of May this year, I spent the week sending one or another of my children down the brick steps to the mailbox to see if the collection had arrived. One Thursday afternoon it was all there in my hands: the startling care with which Moody hews his medium, the dark humor, the perceptive observations on the nature of work, on community, on apocalypse. I made my way through the trio of novellas in a pair of mornings, reveling in the fact that this was Moody (unlike some of his more esoteric work) that I could recommend to every reader I knew. This Moody was less digressive, less deliciously convoluted, less mammoth but still incredibly inventive and funny and moving and smart.

Then, as I moved through the collection, something unexpected and interesting developed. There emerged an excellent bonus, a sort of by-product in the form of a theme each of the three novellas shares…conspiracy! Right Livelihoods is rife with good old-fashioned conspiracy—delusional and self-invented, yes, but still tantalizing what with potential terrorist plots in “The Omega Force,� intra-office suspicion in “K&K,� and apocalyptic psychological manipulation in “The Albertine Notes.� What’s interesting is the way that the presence of conspiracy enhances the intertexuality—evocation of other Moody works by these three novellas—that any Moody devotee will appreciate. That is to say that the accessible yet ingenious tales that comprise Right Livelihoods not only involve the reader in their own intrigue, but each calls to mind, as a nested Chinese box, subtexts that deepen and substantiate not only the novella at hand, but the entire Moody oeuvre.

Take “The Omega Force.� In this, the opening novella, readers are treated to the hilarious meanderings of alcoholic septuagenarian Jamie Van Deusen over the island off Connecticut that he (and Moody) call home. The narrative is first person. And more than a little paranoid. As Van Deusen attempts to unravel a conspiracy (of his own making) numbered headings guide the reader from more foreboding topics “1. The Current National Security Environment� in which a hung-over Van Deusen awakens on an affluent neighbor’s “loggia,� to the less weighty “2. The Dance of the Stick,� in which the good doctor (of public policy) deliberates over which piece of driftwood might serve him best as he conducts a phantom beachside symphony:

Occasionally, I like to lick the stick before I begin to use it. It is important to sample its salty surface, just as I imagine the great scribes of the past, the epic poets, needed to lick their quills or their pencil leads before beginning to compose. I lick the stick before I perform, and if the taste does not meet with my favor, I select another, though I do not throw away the first, I set the first aside in preparation for the Dance of the Stick, because it may happen that this first stick is actually the preferred stick, and I do not know yet because I have not taste-tested my new stick against the other. The sticks, on any given day, form a community of sticks, and it is important to understand them as part of a great forest of potential batons for my stick dance.

Our imbalanced narrator offers up driftwood that is “important to understand,� leading the reader to realize that this “community of sticks� should also be understood as representative of the elements in Van Deusen’s (self-made) conspiracy.

The really fun thing for the Moody devotee is that the object that kicks off Van Deusen’s delusion is a book. There is “The Omega Force� that the reader is reading, and there is the exaggerated, pulpy Omega Force that Van Deusen is reading: “The cover of Omega Force: Code White pictured a strapping young man leaping from an amphibious landing vehicle while brandishing a rather alarming handgun, probably a nine millimeter or some such.� Now if you are the kind of Moody reader who scours the internet for months before the debut of the next novel in order to buy an advanced reading copy of The Diviners before its official publicity date then you will remember that the cover of the ARC shows the same long-haired muscular barbarian as on the hardback version. The former, though, lacks the neat and distancing qualifier, that of a movie audience who is viewing the barbarian on a screen above themselves. The difference seems slight, but is—as are all things conspiratorial—significant. The cover of the ARC depicts not a savvy crowd skeptically viewing the coming of the Hun-like hordes but instead the actually coming of the Hun-like hordes, this image differing little from the supermarket bodice-ripper kind of popular entertainment the massive novel writes itself against. But so—the careful reader of Right Livelihoods, primed toward conspiracy—imagines the cover of Omega Force, which evokes The Diviners, which throws Jamie Van Deusen’s ridiculous plight into high relief as the weight of The Diviners’ examination of television and popular culture inflects the presence of the “mystery novel of some kind� that the shaky Van Deusen finds next to the neighbor’s chaise longue where he “apparently spent the night.�

Description of Omega Force may evoke The Diviners, but as Van Deusen’s conspiracy becomes further convoluted, other of Moody’s works organically emerge. Van Deusen, it turns out, has a damaged son with whom he roams the island, evoking the paternal-filial roaming not only in The Black Veil wherein Moody himself spends an insomniac night on an island off Maine with his own father but also in Purple America wherein Hex Raitliffe and his stepfather spend the wee hours in a very slow sort of car chase and confrontation, not to mention The Ice Storm with Benjamin Hood’s early-morning peripatetics ending with a trudge uphill with the dead son of a neighbor in his arms. Each of these paternal-filial wandering-type situations involves substance abuse. In each, communication is stunted: the grown Van Deusen boy is limited by a fixation with rhyme, Hex by a stutter, Ben Hood in The Ice Storm stymied by canker sores (“more than a dozen at one time�). Moody and his father are less hampered in The Black Veil though the snippet of conversation the author chooses to cite underscores limited communication. Of his father’s days as an insane asylum attendant, Moody says, “I managed to prevail upon my father for more stories; for example, the story about Horace, who said only three things: Yes, Sure and You’re having a time for yourself. These were his three remarks. Yet the day apparently arrived when Horace said No.� Tone-wise “The Omega Force� is more playful and fun to read than the longer, darker novels that predate it. “The Omega Force� is also the funniest of the novellas in Right Livelihoods. The humor that leavens the very real pathos and intelligence of the work, though, does nothing to diminish the novella’s significance, its meaning deepened by the evocation of earlier works that the exploration of conspiracy encourages.

None of this is to suggest that Moody is consciously expanding his work with some kind of sneaky and carefully laid literary conspiracy. This type of non-intentional intertextual play will emerge within the oeuvre of any really fine writer. But in addition to that, the author states in the acknowledgements of Right Livelihoods that both “The Omega Force� and “The Albertine Notes� were the result of separate challenges—near assignment put to him by others—that presumably limited the premeditated inclusion of conspiracy. What functions in this trio of novellas is simply an intelligent underscoring of the element common to all three. Which happens to be conspiracy. Which happens to enable a richer reading through evocation of subtexts.

“K&K� is the shortest of the three novellas, weighing in at just under fifty pages, though it has settled in as my favorite. We enter the world of insurance brokerage, where “Ellie Knight-Cameron oversaw the suggestion box at Kolodny & Kolodny.� Thus opens the only novella not narrated in the first person, its tone less strident (and less delusional) than “The Omega Force,� and far less dark than “The Albertine Notes.� Moody’s skilled description of our protagonist fosters significant reader sympathy:

Ellie Knight-Cameron was thirty-four, and she was a bit heavy for her age, or maybe it was just that despite years of workout regimens and exotic diets she had never once resembled a svelte, cosmopolitan type of woman, and she was a little self-conscious about this, despite her brown ringlets, which took an awful lot of work to maintain, and the mole above her lip that she thought was one of her best features. Her eyes were as gray as flagstones. She had an easy smile. People liked her, just not in that flinging-off-clothes kind of way.

Haunted by the successively more threatening missives submitted to the office suggestion box (here the conspiratorial will get a little wacky and feel sure that Moody’s subconscious had incorporated something of Richard Power’s “Question Box� from The Gold-Bug Variations and Jonathan Lethem’s telephone “Complaint Line� conversations in You Don’t Love Me Yet as if the concept of a suggestion box is something rare), Ellie begins to construct a conspiracy of her own. Perhaps more convincing because she isn’t drunk or high, as are the first-person narrators in the first and last novellas, Ellie’s conspiracy in “K&K� is subtle in a work-a-day fashion, its truly excellent denouement pitch-perfect in its credibility.

As with “The Omega Force,� though, readers of Moody will experience the satisfying enrichment that this conspiracy-inflected trio of novellas fosters. “K&K� is the most mundane of the triptych (as a suburban mother in her thirties, I related more closely to Ellie than either of the other protagonists). It is also the novella that most clearly comments upon the pun in the title, “right livelihood� referring to the fifth step on the Buddhist Eightfold Path (“that each person should follow an honest occupation which fully respects other people and the natural world,� according to the people who annually give the Right Livelihood Award), the loftiness of which emphasizes the ways in which the novellas’ characters fail to live up to such a challenge. The focus on the mundane, though, ingeniously allows further access to Moody’s fictional world. It is precisely the ordinary nature of work that evokes some of Moody’s best writing, subtle repetition of themes and imagery that permits a reader to sink more deeply into the new (as well as remembered) fiction. In “K&K,� corporate existence echoes “Mansion on the Hill� where the inane world of highly commercial wedding services speaks to a peculiarly American desire for homogeneity and excess. Here also is Ben Hood’s stock brokerage, “Shackley and Schwimmer� (Hood’s father having headed up an insurance business), and Lou Sloane’s problematic employment at the Millstone (note this pun) Nuclear Power Station subsidiary of Coastal Power and Light, Inc. in Purple America. More specifically, “K&K� echoes “Silhouette Romance,� a short story whose narrator adds intertextual dimension to Ellie’s character: “I’m the guy,� the protagonist of “Silhouette Romance� tells us. “I’m in reinsurance. I insure insurers.�

Of course this reiteration of the idea of insurance—conspiracy or no—begs readers to contemplate insurance. All sorts of insurance. The idea that we Americans might insure ourselves against the kind of catastrophe that Moody will explore in the final of the three novellas begins to feel awfully suspect. In “K&K� we are treated to the small-scale conspiracies of an ordinary individual. Yet this is the kind of conspiracy I myself resist thinking of daily, trying to defy the human urge to link events and to see a pattern where there is only chance, chaos. Just as Ellie Knight-Cameron “tried to arrange pastimes that involved her friends from the office or from college� I have the occasional “date night� with my husband; as Ellie “tried to eat only organic things� I slather my children with sunscreen and inculcate supposedly non-threatening (but actually kind of harrowing) strategies to ward off “Stranger Danger.� There is little mention of actual insurance in “K&K,� given that Ellie “had nothing much in the way of organizational power,� which detail forces the reader to probe more deeply into the very nature of insurance. Who really has the ability to insure anyone against anything? As our faulty salesman in “Silhouette Romance� says, “Someone assumes the risk. When insurers of record are wiped out by sequences of Northeasters. When autumn arrives with its eleven tropical storms. When winter brings its new Ice Age with snowfalls and roof collapses and auto accidents. … Someone has to answer to these Acts of Nature.� “Silhouette Romance� ends on a bleaker note, “Next winter will be especially hard,� than does “K&K,� Moody closing the novella with startling direct address that draws us further into its conspiratorial nature. The reader feels the work expand to take on meaning outside of the text as Ellie attempts to draw a final conclusion that might solve the suggestion box mystery: “Which conclusion? The one in which Ellie was herself the only possible author of the suggestion? And if she was the only person who could have failed to see this, if it was evident to even the most casual observer that she was both protagonist and antagonist, what did this tell us about the way we lived in those days?�

If “K&K� ends on a somber yet open note, Right Livelihoods gains serious darkness with its final novella, “The Albertine Notes.� There’s an audacity that jars but then feels bold and finally just plain scary in a very effective way when Moody says, “It almost goes without saying that Albertine appeared in a certain socioeconomic sector not long after the blast.� The phrase “almost goes without saying,� alludes both to the impossibility of describing horror on this order while also hinting at the pervasive nature of horror’s ramifications. You imagine footage of the twin towers and the flags flown in your neighborhood afterwards. Even if you weren’t given to conspiracy at this point, your literary mind might wend toward Heidi Julavits’s references to “the Big Terrible� in The Effect of Living Backwards and Jonathan Safran Foer’s post-9/11 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. But then Moody takes us one (upsetting) step further:

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 fifty square blocks of your city suddenly look like a NASA photo of Mars.

Alcoholic and paranoid Jamie Van Deusen? Sweet and suspicious Ellie Knight-Cameron? These two are in a different (and much more comfortable) league than Kevin Lee, protagonist of this final work. “The Albertine Notes� carries a weight, a level of complexity with respect to plot, temporal shifts and a general bleakness that make this novella feel far more grave than the others. The earlier Moody most clearly evoked by “Albertine� is the 1995 novella from the eponymous collection, The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven. Here again is Times Square, here are the abscessed, track-marked forearms of addicts. “Albertine� features “Kevin Lee. Chinese American, third generation,� while the earlier novella follows the plight of Jorge Ruiz, (mother, Puerto Rican; father, Eastern European). While Jorge samples hardcore but known substances, Kevin partakes in “Albertine,� a drug that allows recollection of an idyllic pre-apocalyptic reality (The novella’s title suggests Proust’s Albertine from A la recherche du temps perdus, the title of which is a perfect explanation of the drug’s effect).

Urban collapse? Sexual perversion? Radiation sickness? None of this could be further from my existence here in leafy Menlo Park. And yet, partially because of Moody’s rich intertextuality, I welcomed the disturbing reality. The conspiracy in the first two novellas urged me to unravel intertextual play instead of emptying the dishwasher or attending my quarreling brood. I flipped pages back and forth, Ernst Wentworth of “Albertine� sounding uncannily like Ernest Piccolo of “Omega Force�; “Your imagined web of conspiracy� in “Albertine� recalling both “I was now intimately involved in a conspiracy that threatened not only the island but also the very liberties we so cherish� in “Omega� as well as “…Ellie thought, the conspiracy was calling upon the disgruntled populace to overthrow the existing order.� I have to admit that the conspiracy-type stuff reached such a level that I—just like the novellas’ protagonists—began to imagine conspiratorial underpinnings where there were none. When I alighted upon the name Serena in “Albertine� I actually raced out of the reading nook past noisy kids to my bookshelves where I discovered that the head-trauma victim in The Diviners is not Serena but Samantha and that the female love object in Garden State is Jane, which isn’t even close.

But it also may have been that I splayed “Albertine� down and rushed to the bookcases because I needed a break. I wanted to hear the voices of my innocent children (even squabbling). I felt like patting my dog or fixing a cup of tea. Because “The Albertine Notes� is so powerful and dark that the extraordinary thoughts it provokes are almost uncontainable. Not to say that there aren’t some very funny bits! The one time I laughed out loud in Right Livelihoods was during a certain Q&A session between Kevin and anthropologist Ernest Wentworth whose manner was so simultaneously ordinary and preposterous that I found him hilarious. Or how about this:

It’s a conspiracy of order, you understand, and that’s a particularly revolutionary conspiracy right now… And there are some other very odd examples I could give you. A talk show host from ten or fifteen years ago seems to turn up quite a bit, perhaps just because his name is so memorable, Regis Philbin. You’d be surprised how close to the entire inner workings of the Albertine epidemic is Regis Philbin.

But far outweighing the humor is the fact that everyone in “Albertine� (everyone who wasn’t part of the four million annihilated by the blast) is ill. There is radiation sickness, there is fallout and cancer and this terrible cloud that obscures light. Our protagonist lives in a closet in an armory and values a few containers of cleaning fluid because resources are in such demand. Yet Moody’s language is so dazzling and his characters so compelling that you can’t quit the novella (as I did with Delillo’s White Noise in which the father’s attempts to save his children from the “toxic airborne event� was simply so well done that I found myself entirely overwhelmed.).

The parts of “Albertine� that really got me were the descriptions that built on practical, mundane frustrations, the kind that bring apocalypse into focus for someone like me—a soccer mom:

On the way back to the armory, I waited on the line up the block for the one pay phone that still worked. Usually there were fifty or sixty people out front. All of them simmering with rage because the connection was sketchy, the phone often disconnected, and everyone listened to the other callers, to the conversations. Imagine the sound of the virtual automaton’s computerized warmth: We’re sorry, the parties you are contacting are unable to accept the call. Who was sorry exactly? The robot? Guy holding the receiver shouted, “I need to know the name of that prescription! I am not a well man!� Then the disconnection. A woman begged her husband to take her back. Disconnection. And a kid who had lost his parents, trying to locate his grandparents. Disconnection. The phone booth offered that multitude of sad stories.

Sad stories indeed. Read something as profound and understated and as smart as that and you welcome a sojourn to Candy Land with a five-year-old.

It was as I worked further into “The Albertine Notes,� further away from the gritty but manageable world of the “The Ring,� that the true foreboding settled in. Even as I followed Kevin Lee through an irradiated Manhattan, it was more my own catastrophic imagery that served as subtext than any previous Moody text. The details of Moody’s imagined apocalypse were what created such a powerful reaction: there is the familiar, now-eradicated skyline made excellently strange under Moody’s gaze: “Once my city was the greatest, but this was not the view anymore,…South of the Citicorp Center, whose tampon-applicator summit had been blown clean off, there was nothing. Get it?�; even more powerful was a forlorn wooden swing (“the kind that were always stolen in the projects�) that held not the pudgy toddler it might have in my neighborhood, but a bruised-eyed and tracked-armed addict (the aptly named Casssandra) who may or may not have held the key to the mystery of “The Albertine Notes.� My subtext—the bits of my own reality that wove themselves together around and about “Albertine�—included a series of actual drive-by shootings in my own peaceful Northern California hamlet during May of 2007, also the pernicious growth hormone in my children’s milk and climate change and our lost DMV registration and nearly obsessive questioning (this last more directly from “Albertine�) as to how easy someone might just import a dirty bomb into San Francisco by messenger bike. “Albertine� was powerful enough to produce actual adrenaline surges not unlike protagonist Kevin Lee’s pivotal anxiety disorder. “Albertine� evoked in broad daylight the kind of fears I usually reserve for the middle of the night, the familiar but histrionic, self-absorbed concern that some major catastrophe might occur before I can see my little kids into adulthood or my parents into senescence (or my first book—due out next year—into publication).

And yet, isn’t this kind of vision sort of healthy? Maybe even necessary? As an apocalyptic “genre� story, “The Albertine Notes� takes its bold place in chronology after 1984 and Mad Max, Fiskadoro and The Children of Men and The Road as a reminder of what we need to avoid. So what is a reader to do? I went on-line and bought back the carbon emissions from our cars. I played a game of Crazy Eights with my tender children—kids who would grow up in Northern California as had Kevin from “Albertine� in exactly the same time-frame as Kevin from “Albertine.� As I sat playing cards, I let exaggerated conspiratorial thinking to wash over (and away from) me. The game would end and the kids would busy themselves and I would take the coffee grounds out to the composter and vow to ride my bike more and shudder at the memory when only days before, LAX was paralyzed (my seven-year-old daughter and I in a security line) by the chilling bellow of a half-dozen uniformed policemen demanding, “Stay still!� which we did, feeling terrible relief only at the “All Clear!� (the authority figures actually successively calling, “All Clear!� the distressing ripple making its way through the terminal).
But on a Tuesday afternoon in May when my household is relatively content and I have a moment to myself, I did what I tend to do with each new Moody book—the prospect of it a sort of salve given the intelligent humor, the insight and the more manageable pathos in “The Omega Force�—I added milk to my tea and prepared my favorite place in the reading nook, then I sat down and I started to read Right Livelihoods again.