Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas
by Rick Moody
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Read in April, 2008
I'm rounding up to 4 stars from 3.5. As my tags show, I heard about this book on NPR. In the radio interview, I believe they talked mainly about the third story: The Albertine Notes. I actually liked the first two better, although once I started understanding what was going on, I enjoyed 'Albertine' too.
The Albertine Notes is about a drug where the 'high' is memory. It gives you extremely detailed, vivid recollections of your memories. Some people are able to shoot up and then change ...more
The Albertine Notes is about a drug where the 'high' is memory. It gives you extremely detailed, vivid recollections of your memories. Some people are able to shoot up and then change ...more
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Read in December, 2007
recommends it for:
city dwellers
This is a difficult book to write about because its three novellas are so very different. Their distinctness allows them to stand alone as separate works but jumping from one to another proves difficult because there is no cohesion. Even in a good collection of short stories, the characters and elements change, but there is some strand--a voice or tone--that stays constant, or the experience can be jarring. Reading Right Livelihoods felt like Moody was, genius-ly in some cases, experimenting via...more
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Read in August, 2007
(The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)
As long as there's been artists, there's been fans of artists; and as long as there's been fans of artists, there's been the question of artists' oeuvres, a fancy French term for "body of work." You see, we nerdy fans of the arts love not only ingesting the latest book or movie or CD by our favorite artists, and judging its worth on its own terms, but also compar...more
As long as there's been artists, there's been fans of artists; and as long as there's been fans of artists, there's been the question of artists' oeuvres, a fancy French term for "body of work." You see, we nerdy fans of the arts love not only ingesting the latest book or movie or CD by our favorite artists, and judging its worth on its own terms, but also compar...more
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Read in February, 2008
This book was a delight after reading the Palahniuk's Rant. Where Master P stretches two or more presposterous ideas across each other until they become a taut web over which his Huck Finn characters are doomed to scramble, Moody starts with the character and allows the complexities of the worlds they inhabit to be illuminated over time, as if they are slowly illuminating a cave by placing candles on the outcroppings.
In each of the novellas, the charater is embroiled in an environment...more
In each of the novellas, the charater is embroiled in an environment...more
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Read in September, 2007
Each of these three novellas give Moody's traditional hypersensitive prose some kind of . The most successful by far is "The Albertine Notes," a dystopia set in a near-future New York where half of Manhattan has been destroyed by a bomb and most of the population is addicted to a drug which promises to bring back pleasant memories. A reporter is dispatched to Brooklyn, where the cartel and the first addicts are believed to have lived, and gets caught up in this convoluted underworld. I...more
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Read in October, 2007
rick, you're making ME moody. i've loved every story you've ever had published in any "best of" anthology. i adored "demonology" and pushed it on strangers.
but lately...you're less the astonishingly compelling writer man i've loved and more laureate-y and obscure. i really struggled to finish any of the these three novellas, and only managed the last, "the albertine notes."
amy benfer, on salon, said this of moody:
"And then there are writers who ar...more
but lately...you're less the astonishingly compelling writer man i've loved and more laureate-y and obscure. i really struggled to finish any of the these three novellas, and only managed the last, "the albertine notes."
amy benfer, on salon, said this of moody:
"And then there are writers who ar...more
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Read in August, 2007
All you haters: Please stop hating on Rick Moody. He is one of the only writers with a hip, po-mo aesthetic who I can actually stomach. Alright, so Right Livelihoods is not his most impressive work. It's not on par with Garden State, or The Ice Storm, or even The Diviners (which I really loved). But as a work of "post-September 11" fiction (a designation that makes my skin crawl a bit) I found it satisfying, clever, and thought provoking to an extent riv...more
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Read in June, 2007
so i actually only read the one novella I was interested in, "The Albertine Notes", but i give the book three stars on that basis. it's yr standard quote literary unquote writer slumming in the genre fiction aisles kinda routine. 'cept it's a pretty good tale, about memory and loss and fractured time. it's Rick Moody doing Ballard and PKD like the blurbs say. it also mines territories similar to Vurt and DMZ. oh yeah, and it was totally confusing to read, but still riveting for ...more
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Read in November, 2007
i guess i just need to stop reading rick moody. i always feel like he's joking or winking or being tongue-in-cheek and will switch tones or perspectives or characters soon, but then it lasts the duration. i can't say what it is that strikes me as so insincere, even dishonest, about his narratives but it leaves me cold even when the 'facts' of the story interest me.
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Read in May, 2008
i stopped keeping track of what Rick Moody was doing after being bored and depressed with everything by him after the first collection of stories (Ring of Brightest Angels...) that i read. this is proving to be more amusing, if not very consequential. I especially like the delusional unreliable narrator in the first of the three novellas.
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Fairly lame. The first novella is written in a satiric mock-epic style. The second is office drone humor/ennui. Moody can do both these modes in his sleep. The third novella is at least half-way decent (if sometimes very hard to follow). He's been coasting for the past few books, and this does nothing to reverse the slide.
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Read in May, 2007
Not the best work I've seen from him--this reads more like three dashed-off novellas, rather than the careful planning and writing that typifies his full novels and short stories. As three novellas about paranoia, though, it was pretty good.
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Read in August, 2007
I quit reading the first one. Just boring.
Second one was okay.
Third was worth it all.
Second one was okay.
Third was worth it all.
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