Mother’s little helper

THERE’S a pun in the title of Rick Moody’s audacious and uneven eighth book, “Right Livelihoods,” but whether it’s the thugs’ hoods or the ‘hoods they inhabit that are right lively is up for grabs. What’s unmistakable in this trio of novellas is Moody’s obsession with meaning and misunderstanding, and the netherworlds in between.

The trilogy opens with “The Omega Force,” a post-Sept. 11 farce about a blowhard whose fall off the wagon makes him see evil-doers lurking in every shadow. Dr. Jamie Van Deusen, a retired policy wonk, awakens at dawn after passing out on a neighbor’s seaside deck. We soon learn he’s been relegated by his wife to this second-rate island in the hope -- vain, as it turns out -- of keeping him sober.

Influenced by “Omega Force: Code White,” a pulpy thriller he’s been reading, Van Deusen’s pickled brain spins a rumor about “dark-complected persons” nosing around the local air strip into a bender-fueled paranoia. Determined to protect his home and neighbors from terrorist attack, Van Deusen roams the island in a tizzy. Along the way, he loses his glasses, his wallet and most of his clothes, nearly drowns, crashes a golf game and, in his skivvies, conducts an orchestra he hears in his head. Some of the soused freedom fighter’s inner monologue: “How is it that the music of this deaf syphilitic was so perfectly calibrated to elevate the heart of a tired former civil servant? I do not know. I know only that sometimes I am made to dance the Dance of the Stick, and no stick is better than the parched, whitewashed sticks that wash up on our beaches.”

It’s a funny piece, hilarious at times, a sly and wicked skewering of the self-indulgence that can mark modern-day anxieties. Moody has nailed Van Deusen’s pompous lingo -- he wears “spectacles,” not glasses. The hair of former colleague Caspar Weinberger was a sweptback, “erotic forelock curl.” He disdains the Internet as a “highfalutin set of Yellow Pages.”

A section on the vagaries of memory, one of the few moments that Van Deusen gets to be anything but a buffoon, links it to “The Albertine Notes,” by far the strongest -- and most disturbing -- piece in the book. (The middle novella, “K & K,” whose inspiration Moody credits to writer Amy Hempel, is a smug and unconvincing story that runs around in circles for a bit, then screeches to a welcome halt.)

“The Albertine Notes,” a sci-fi panic attack in 88 pages, gives us Manhattan in the days after a dirty bomb levels 50 square blocks. Half the populace -- 4 million people -- lies dead in the streets. What remains of the blasted city looks like “a NASA photo of Mars.” Survivors crave Albertine, a seductive new drug peddled by vicious thugs. Albertine lets users relive their memories as vividly as though they were happening for the first time. For the narrator, Kevin Lee, a journalist hired by a soft-core porn magazine shortly after the bombing to do a piece on the drug’s origins, it’s “the smell of a city park at the moment a September shower dampens the pavement, car exhaust, a mist hanging over the air at dusk, the sound of kids fighting over the rules of softball, a homeless dude scamming you for a sip of your rum. Get the idea?”

Trouble is, you forget even more when you come down. The more Albertine you use, the less you know. The less you are. As the story unspools, so does time itself. Albertine, it seems, demolishes the linear notion of time, turns it into a Rube Goldberg machine of crazed logic. In fact, time under the influence of Albertine is so malleable that it’s possible to change the past.

Mucking with time and memory has been in vogue for a while now, what with films such as “Memento,” “The Matrix” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” More recently, “The Raw Shark Texts,” by Brit sensation Steven Hall, has taken a literary stab at the genre. But Moody brings things to a new level. First, you’re just reading along, then you’re parsing, then suddenly you’re trapped in the vertiginous flow. Some sequences go on too long, some explanations get too preciously arcane. And for a work this brief, a few too many threads get teased and then dropped. But say what you will about Moody -- and lord knows he’s had a controversial career -- there’s some brilliant stuff here. His chilly, lacerating prose is a seduction, not unlike Albertine itself.