US NOVELIST RICK MOODY IS BEST known for The Ice Storm, filmed by Ang Lee in 1997. His new book consists of three novellas, each a kind of offbeat whodunit, suggesting comparison with Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. Ultimately what links these
stories, however, is not their content or style, as in Auster, but rather the continuing unease over the war on terror.
The longest and by far the best of the stories is "The Albertine Notes", in which Chinese-American journalist Kevin Lee describes the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Manhattan. A strange new drug has appeared, Albertine, which enables users to relive memories as vividly as if they were really happening. The drug's name is presumably an arch reference to the heroine of Proust's In Search Of Lost Time: certainly, the story makes play with ideas of time and memory in ways that are enjoyably complex, at times confusing.
On assignment for an upmarket porn magazine, Lee is trying to discover the origins of the drug, whose supply is controlled by an elusive figure named Cortez. The name is another reference, this time spelled out explicitly: "the culture of Albertine itself changed when Cortez appeared, just as did the culture of the continent when the original Cortez, great explorer, bearer of a shipload of smallpox, arrived".
Themes of colonialism and racism rise to the surface: Lee has always been typecast as "an inscrutable kid from the East", while the new masters of an irradiated New York are Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and other immigrant communities declaring, "Hey, time for us to be heard".
The story soon takes a number of extraordinary twists. There are rumours that Albertine produces not only memories of the past, but visions of the future: one user has averted a disaster. In the most obvious bit of significant naming, Lee teams up with a junkie called Cassandra, and learns that Albertine memories can be shared. "Think biochemistry … Think quantum mechanics … And because it's all about electrical charges, it's all about power, right? And about who has the power."
Soon we're into Jung's collective unconscious, the "diachronous theory of abuse", and Lee's attempts to revisit a lost love. Moody's suave prose keeps the whole thing pleasantly airborne, even when it transpires that users have the power to control their memories and hence to change the past. Albertine is a kind of time machine, and Lee's ultimate mission is to avert the blast that destroyed Manhattan.
The story's 90 pages feel about right, given the chronicle-like narration and the density of ideas, but it seems a pity for Moody not to have worked it into a full-length novel. That would have necessitated deeper characterisation and a more consistent plot, neither of which would have been a bad thing.
For the other two pieces in this book, the opposite applies: they are short stories stretched way too thinly. The first is told by an elderly man who wakes up in a state of some disarray on a neighbour's porch and finds a thriller – the eponymous "Omega Force" – whose lurid prose both intrigues and repels him. The ironic first-person voice is almost like an American version of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads; the snobbishness and insularity are nicely captured.
But once the central conceit becomes apparent – the man is delusional – there is nowhere much to go, so that although his paranoid fantasies about terrorist infiltration of his gated community strike the tone for the whole book, they do so elegantly rather than resonantly.
The other story, "K&K", goes over similar territory, but in the context of a small insurance office where someone is dropping foul-mouthed messages in the suggestion box, to the distress of prim singleton Ellie Knight-Cameron. This time written in restricted third-person rather than first, the writing is just as accomplished, and the denouement just as predictable.
Ellie eliminates the suspects one by one, teetering into social disaster, while we are inexorably nudged towards the only possible conclusion as to the identity of the malcontent. Once again, self-delusion is the key.
Both stories are tinged with the xenophobic paranoia of Bush's America, and a frantic clinging to old-fashioned certainties that were never really there, but it is only in "The Albertine Notes" that these snap clearly and harshly into view. For that story alone, this book is worth buying; though penny– conscious readers might be interested to know that it was previously published in literary journal McSweeney's and Year's Best SF 9.
• Andrew Crumey's novel Sputnik Caledonia is published this month by Picador, price £7.99
