Rick Moody feels like someone we know. His midcareer wounding, at the hands of the critic Dale Peck, was a crisis in which his readers participated. Mr. Moody himself may care relatively little about the famous review — “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation,” wrote Mr. Peck in the New Republic in 2002 — and his work in no obvious way reflects the wound. But his readers, especially those of us who had misgivings about his work, felt that they had been addressed, that only the positive part of Mr. Moody’s achievement was left to argue for.

I enjoyed Mr. Moody’s new collection, “Right Livelihoods: 3 Novellas” Little, Brown; 223 pages; $23.99) as a familiar pleasure, one that I had discovered, and then distrusted, and can now enjoy, warts and all. I don’t know what it would be like to read Mr. Moody for the first time at this point. My guess is that the work would seem ambitious but strained, and very much part of a generational wave, one that has crested and is now flattening out, still foaming, on the beach.

After the long, odd memoir that drew Mr. Peck’s bullets, and after the tediously epic “The Diviners” (2005), here are three novellas that remind us why Mr. Moody was such a big target in the first place. “The Ice Storm” (1994) notwithstanding, Mr. Moody’s short stories have been the best vessel of his peculiar instantaneous reaches, his short-fused perorations, his transhistorical plumbings, and, yes, his long, listing sentences.

Two of the three novellas collected here were commissioned. “The Omega Force,” a satire of paranoia that puts a senile Republican in a Pynchonesque spin, was written for the Paris Review, in memory of George Plimpton. “The Albertine Notes,” an otherthan-Proustian science fiction that turns a memory-enhancing drug first into a kind of time travel, and then into a cyberspace of the collective unconscious, was written for Michael Chabon’s genre collection in McSweeney’s. Only the more spontaneous “K&K,” the shortest and least farfetched, a tale of quiet desperation told by Ellie, a single 30-something woman working for a Stamford, Conn. insurance firm, seems tired and dated, motivated by demographic observations.

All of these stories make a point about life after September 11, 2001. But the angst feels forced. Ellie drives herself crazy by schizophrenically scaring herself with violent suggestions in her office’s suggestions box:

If it was evident to even the most casual observer that she was both protagonist and antagonist, what did this tell us about the way we lived in those days?

What does it tell us? Writing, the reader cries out, doesn’t have to tell us anything in quite this way.

“The Omega Force” makes better use of similarly trumped-up political stakes. The crusty Dr. Van Deusen, a public policy retiree, believes that terrorists are plotting to invade the quiet New England island where he lives. He pins the local modern architect as a conspirator:

The kinds of personalities who would practice modernism, as I’m defining it, would certainly do such dreadful things as tip off dark-complected persons.

Van Deusen goes on to rail against Fyodor Dostoevsky, postcolonial literature, and the Nation of Islam — all good fun, but not credible as fictional speech by this particular character.

Van Deusen finally drives himself, like Cuchulain, into a battle with the sea, in which he imagines himself visible, somehow, to the terrorist plot: “I was the sign because there was always a sign, there was an indication, a first shot, a lantern in a window.”

The authorial desire to draw everything together first attracted me to Mr. Moody. To a youthful reader, it looks like a sure mark of the Great American Novel. Of course it is not that, but rather something fundamentally more mannered. Like Mr. Moody’s incessant italic emphases, it is the opposite of convincing. That is why “The Albertine Notes,” advertised as genre fiction and hence freer to be artificially mind-blowing, pleases me so much.

Mr. Moody’s stroke of genius is to figure his alternate sci-fi reality not as a technological wonder but as a kind of narrative trick. Albertine is a metafictional drug. A “tip,” in this universe, is a belletristic insight:

The culture of Albertine itself changed when Cortez [the cartel kingpin] appeared, just as did the culture of the continent when the original Cortez … arrived. This was of course, a variation on the so-called diachronous theory of abuse patterns.

That’s Mr. Moody’s characteristic vision — diachronous patterns — in a nutshell.

But strokes of genius are the given in big-idea fiction like Mr. Moody’s. What makes his work shine is the high-wattage verbal fun those ideas justify. He gets to type the phrase “the eons were neon.” The memory drug licenses a riot of flashback: “in the shooting gallery, my stool was tipping backward, and the back of my head was connecting with some hard surface, citronella, cardamom, smell of melting vinyl, smell of a pack of Polaroid film.”

If you can appreciate Mr. Moody’s big ideas as something other than grand, as a more modest kind of electrical stimulation, or even as a performance of ambition, then you are still with him. These novellas, perhaps because they are minor, notify us that Mr. Moody has — and that we are — a newly relaxed readership.

blytal@nysun.com