Rick Moody once seemed among the most unlikely of writers to grow bored with himself. After satirising his Nixon-era WASP childhood in his best-known novel The Ice Storm (1994), his memoir The Black Veil (2002) intercut his history of drug and alcohol abuse with the story of an ancestor who wore a veil in penance for inadvertently killing a friend: 'Get to know my book the way you would get to know me,' Moody wrote, 'in the fullness of time, hesitantly, irritably, impatiently, uncertainly, pityingly, generously.'
But as he sips herbal tea in a Brooklyn cafe, with no outward signs of his manic prose or unstable past, Moody says he now finds himself a dull subject. The Black Veil belongs to a different era:
he submitted the final draft on September 10, 2001. 'After 9/11, I really wanted to deal with the culture as a whole instead of just navel gazing,' he says in his slow drawl.
The three novellas of his latest book, The Omega Force, explore post-September 11 paranoia. K&K follows a drudge at an insurance brokerage unravelling the mystery of an anonymous colleague posting menacing notes in the suggestion box. The Albertine Notes is cyberpunk sci-fi set in a bomb-flattened Manhattan; the surviving New Yorkers are afflicted by an epidemic of the drug 'albertine' that stimulates happy memories from before the blast.
In the title story, a retired government official becomes convinced his island sanctum is being invaded by 'dark-complected' foreigners. In Moody's view, the protagonists of the three novellas 'have a mania that induces them to interpret wrongly. It's the illness of the Bush administration to be constantly reading into things and imagining conspiracies around every corner.'
With his disaffected characters and hip style, Moody is sometimes grouped alongside Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem and Jeffrey Eugenides as a generation of American postmodernists reacting against their realist forebears. But there is little conventionally cool about Moody. A slight man of 46, he wears a beige cardigan over a faded R.L. Burnside T-shirt. Off alcohol and nicotine (and sugar, caffeine and meat) he practises yoga and plays in a folk band.
Moody is an agnostic who goes to church because he loves ritual and feels 'you have to believe in something'. In 1997 he co-edited Joyful Noise, a collection of essays on the New Testament. 'I had a theory that the only way for the Left to have a cultural impact in the way it did of old was to reco-opt the Bible, which I felt had been hijacked by the Right.'