false 2 0 false false Sat Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu Aug 21 11:15:23 -0700 2008 Sun Mar 08 09:11:25 -0700 2009
I moved on to the third and final "novella" which was worthy of a three star rating. Moody's only attempt at working within the (loosely defined version of the) sci-fi genre. In fact, the whole reason the story came about was that McSweeny's asked him to write a sci-fi story. NYC has been decimated in a nuclear attack, the city is gripped by desperation and chaos and millions of people seeking to forget themselves or at least their selves of the present. A fictional chemical compound begins to proliferate throughout the city's illegal drug trade/consumption networks. This substance causes the user to vividly relive past memories, like, really relive them, with no ability to differentiate the artificially induced memory from "real life." Many confusing and interesting social, psychological and philosophical implications follow. It reminded a little bit of the mostly cheesy but conceptually great (“on paper” so to speak) film Strange Days featuring Ralph Fiennes in which he peddles other people's recorded experiences which you can pop into a minidisc looking thing strapped to your head and vividly relive as if you are that person having that experience.

I went back to the first "novella" (I can't help but poke fun with "scare quotes" at this book's use of the term "novella". It's like a Tourettic tic or something...) and finished it. I liked the basic underlying ideas that seemed to bubble under the surface and the drunken, eldery and increasingly delusional central character has some hilarious moments (like in the way that senility can sometimes be funny) but I continued to get the feeling that something else should happen and was merely met with more mundane descriptions of mundane things. Moody tends to do this to me: I get the feeling something revelatory is just around the corner but it rarely ever emerges. I find myself rereading the last paragraphs of his stories over and over, squinting my eyes for something I may have missed, something redemptive or interesting or meaningful—even in an "anti-sentimentalist" kind of way—and I rarely every see it. Consequently I can't even remember how most of his stories or "novellas" end even a day or two after finishing them.

I didn't start the second/middle "novella" before returning it to the library.

I will ¾-heartedly recommend the last one.
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