Q: A paranoia theme seems to run through the three very different novellas. Are you worried about people who are worried, or about a government that stirs up mass hysteria?
A: The latter. Paranoia or, to use the Nabokovian term that was uppermost in my mind, “referential mania,” are the diseases of the age. They are the post- 9/11 zeitgeist. I’m worried much of the time. But not about the government, it turns out. The government is mainly inept. I’m worried about my roof, which is slate. Or about traffic. Or about galloping middle age. The epidemic of imaginary plots is itself a little bit worrisome, but not the substance of the plots themselves. I hope the latest presidential election will not, as during the last one, produce a new proliferation of conspiracies, some warranted, some not.
Q: How did the format for this book come about?
A: The stories were written separately --- or, at least, “Albertine” and “Omega Force” were written separately. “K&K” was written later to connect to the two of them, although they already seemed connected thematically.
Q: How much advance planning do you do in your work?
A: I have the characters, and I usually have a mood or atheme, but that’s all the planning. I play the horn. I justride the horse in the direction the horse is going.
Q: Dr. Van Deusen in “The Omega Force” is not a likable character, yet you keep the reader fascinated. How do you make someone unlikable compelling?
A: I don’t worry about likable or unlikable, I worry about true or false. The vast majority of people I experience in the world are unlikable, so I always think this vogue for sympathetic characters is a kind of vanity or narcissism on the part of readers. I think Van Deusen is plenty likable, but that may just be because he’s true. The truth is mighty compelling, in this view.
Q: In “K&K,” the intelligent and obsessive character Ellie Knight- Cameron brings to mind those thought up by the British novelist Will Self. Are you two in cahoots?
A: I like Will’s work a great deal. In fact, I genuinely love his most recent novel, The Book of Dave. I think everyone should read it. He knows many more obscure words than I do. There’s an inevitable appearance of a word like “gobsmack” in the Self oeuvre, or something similar. I suppose when you like and admire someone, their brilliance rubs off on you, however obscurely.
Q: There are lots of lists in your work. Do you sit around reading obscure antiques catalogs?
A: My wife is a decorative- arts historian. She’s the one with the antiques catalog in her head. But as far as list- making in general, I wish I could do less of it. And yet I enjoy books like The Anatomy of Melancholy, which are all about the lists. Lists kind of make me feel as if the world is contained in a book. They make a book feel less imaginary somehow, as though it has real texture.
Q: The visual artist Brion Gysin used to say, and William Burroughs liked to quote, that literature was fifty years behind painting. What forms will the novel take?
A: I think the novel will probably be hypertextual. Partly on the Web, partly on a screen, with sound effects. I think, inevitably, that a novel will be delivered on portable e-book screens, in order to save trees. I agree with Brion and Mr. Burroughs. It’s sometimes breathtaking how conservative literature can be, even when it wishes and hopes
to do better.
Maggie Estep’s interview with Rick Moody originally appeared in the New
York Post on July 8, 2007. Reprinted with permission.
Excerpted from Right Livelihoods © Copyright 2009 by Rick Moody. Reprinted with permission by Back Bay Books. All rights reserved.
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