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Nobody Move
From the National Book Award–winning, bestselling author of Tree of Smoke comes a provocative thriller set in the American West. Nobody Move, which first appeared in the pages of Playboy, is the story of an assortment of lowlifes in Bakersfield, California, and their cat-and-mouse game over $2.3 million. Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Mo...more
Hardcover, 196 pages
Published
April 27th 2009
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(first published 2009)
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Okay, so I'll take back my fifteen-year-old pronouncement based on nothing but adolescent prejudice, and finally admit it: Denis Johnson is a really good writer. I wish I could write like Denis Johnson, unless that'd mean I'd also have to dress like Denis Johnson, and start going around in the off-channel-quickly-canceled-nineties-cop-show style purple blazer he's wearing in his author's photo. In that case I guess I'll just go on writing like me, and live with the depressing and thoroughly unex...more
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Bakerfield, California. Jimmy Luntz works for Gambol who in turn works for Juarez. Luntz loves a beautiful alcoholic Indian girl called Anita Desilvera. They are all petty thieves. One time, they got a big haul from a bank: $2.5M. This book is about greed and who should get how much. Of course, there has to be someone to chase them so here comes Mary the army medic who has been hunting for Gambol since time immemorial.
Notice the names: Jimmy is the main protagonist and Jimmy is a "common name."...more
Notice the names: Jimmy is the main protagonist and Jimmy is a "common name."...more
16 likes · like · see review
I haven't read many crime novels lately, so maybe my reaction to this shouldn't be trusted. I don't want to come off like one of those people who raves about a shitty cover band because they haven't seen live music in forever. But I couldn't get enough of Denis Johnson's Nobody Moves.
What I liked: The dialogue, the characters, the pace, the energy. The combination of menace and memorable characters puts it somewhere between Barry Gifford writing his way out of a hangover and Elmore Leonard on a...more
What I liked: The dialogue, the characters, the pace, the energy. The combination of menace and memorable characters puts it somewhere between Barry Gifford writing his way out of a hangover and Elmore Leonard on a...more
1 like · like · see review
The story starts with a kidnapping in Bakersfield by a big guy named Ernie. He's mean and gets the girl. (Just not the way you'd like.) I'm tired of being stereotyped.
Denis Johnson's "Nobody Move," set in the depressed burgs of Northern California, is a moody homage to the works of Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and James M. Cain.. All of Johnson's characters are losers of one sort or another: Jimmy Luntz, a middle-aged nobody with a serious gambling debt; Juarez, Jimmy's creditor, a small-time crook who has assumed a false name and accent to conceal the fact that he is actually from the Middle East; Gambol, Juarez's lumbering "enforcer" who is sent to co...more
"Nobody Move" is the Denis Johnson novel I have been waiting for since "The Name of the World" came out nearly ten years ago. For most of the interviening decade Johnson toiled away to produce "Tree of Smoke", a long-winded and often directionless novel. Enough people confused its massiveness for merit to earn Tree of Smoke the National Book Award - an honor that might have more to do with finally giving Johnson the credit he deserves for earlier (and better) works like "Resuscitation of a Hange...more
3 likes · like · see review
Very cool.
Blowing someone's head off, while extremely visceral/ shocking, and probably just plain disgusting, is also incredibly easy to do if you have a gun. I know this sounds dumb, but think about it. Johnson's instances of violence in this novel seem to come almost too incredibly easy to his characters, and I'd submit that it isn't because they're all one-dimension amoral PIGS ... but because, hey, if you're in this situation, it probably IS pretty damn easy to just shoot someone.
The decisi...more
Blowing someone's head off, while extremely visceral/ shocking, and probably just plain disgusting, is also incredibly easy to do if you have a gun. I know this sounds dumb, but think about it. Johnson's instances of violence in this novel seem to come almost too incredibly easy to his characters, and I'd submit that it isn't because they're all one-dimension amoral PIGS ... but because, hey, if you're in this situation, it probably IS pretty damn easy to just shoot someone.
The decisi...more
Wow! Just when I was starting to worry that Elmore Leonard in his 80's might not be writing many more books, along comes this one by Denis Johnson. I had read Johnson's award winning "Tree of Smoke" last year - and it was very good but this is completely different and it knocked my socks off. It's 200 pages of non-stop action with colorful low-life characters, great dialog and a wild plot. The story follows the fortunes of Jimmy Luntz a down on his luck small time gambler who is on the run from...more
I think it's pretty awesome that a hugely acclaimed literary fiction writer opted to pay homage to the great American genre of the hardboiled crime novel, and not with any pomo-type spin or intent to subvert involved. But Nobody Move shows why this doesn't happen much, and shouldn't. Johnson knows how to write these sorts of characters, and he's got the dialogue exactly right. There's some pretty great writing here, fucking brilliant turns of phrase now and then. But Johnson doesn't have the gen...more
"So noir it's almost pitch-black". That's the quote on the cover of "Nobody Move". Another one namedrops "Reservoir Dogs" and "No Country For Old Men", Chandler, Leonard, Ellroy and Cain, so we get the idea of the territory we've wandered into. But have we? Johnson's book rattles along at a rare old pace with plenty of action, and it's written in the spare, hardboiled noir style that looks so easy to replicate, but, believe me, isn't, but yet somehow it doesn't quite ring true - a sort of faux-n...more
There are such mixed reviews about this book - strongly opposing - & I will try & get hold of a copy of "Trees of Smoke" which seems to have faired better.
This one annoyed me on so many levels, altho I did finish it to see where the plot would take me. I loved the humour & laughed readily, but really, most of the conversation felt contrived. Yes, I know I was supposed to be reading noir crime, but it felt like a high school effort, rather than an experienced novelist. Some of the dia...more
This one annoyed me on so many levels, altho I did finish it to see where the plot would take me. I loved the humour & laughed readily, but really, most of the conversation felt contrived. Yes, I know I was supposed to be reading noir crime, but it felt like a high school effort, rather than an experienced novelist. Some of the dia...more
Of all the fiction I've read by Denis Johnson, I thought Nobody Move had the least to offer. Stylistically and thematically, it's of a piece with his other work. The characters would slot easily into Angels or the narrator's drugged out adventures in Jesus' Son.
But the level of emotional depth is missing, probably because the writing feels less crisp and careful. For reasons that aren't Johnson's fault, his fiction tends to walk the edges of cliché and bromide, but he's always been able to writ...more
But the level of emotional depth is missing, probably because the writing feels less crisp and careful. For reasons that aren't Johnson's fault, his fiction tends to walk the edges of cliché and bromide, but he's always been able to writ...more
Fun, quick, dirty---but don't mistake that for good or compelling. You definitely get a sense of Johnson slumming here. Well, maybe not slumming. How about channeling. Channeling testosterone. There's so much of it flowing through this noir diversion my back hair thickened before page 30. Because real men eat each other's testicles for lunch, see. They blow each other's melons open. The simple social graces are opportunities to cock-woggle. Ask a dude his name and he replies, "Fuck Off." Is that...more
9 likes · like · see review
Great opening to a fun book: Pre-performance jitters in a male chorus. The character imagines it is a taste of what being in a battle is like.
The last Johnson book I tried to read was 'Fiskadoro', I could not finish it. This made me very gloomy, because I believe in Johnson. But science fiction is not an area where he is gifted, even though I know that book has many fans.
He has a gift for describing a certain faction of America. The only way I can think to describe this faction is tattered, inte...more
The last Johnson book I tried to read was 'Fiskadoro', I could not finish it. This made me very gloomy, because I believe in Johnson. But science fiction is not an area where he is gifted, even though I know that book has many fans.
He has a gift for describing a certain faction of America. The only way I can think to describe this faction is tattered, inte...more
This book is less than two hundred pages, so you can blow through it almost as quickly as the action happens. It's probably so short because the high energy would be impossible to sustain for much longer.
Jimmy Luntz, the protagonist, is almost likeable as a screw-up with a bad gambling debt and just enough dumb luck to get himself even deeper when he accidentally-on purpose shoots the guy who comes to beat him up when he can't pay. But he only shoots Gambol in the leg instead of killing him, an...more
Jimmy Luntz, the protagonist, is almost likeable as a screw-up with a bad gambling debt and just enough dumb luck to get himself even deeper when he accidentally-on purpose shoots the guy who comes to beat him up when he can't pay. But he only shoots Gambol in the leg instead of killing him, an...more
While the experts may claim there is no such thing as a perfect crime, Nobody Move is a perfect crime novel - full of moral mazes, messy murders, and topped with a dark and drunken femme fatale. Perhaps the most exciting element is Johnson's subtle and continuous probing into the inner depths of his characters - a significant plot point all too often dropped by strength of the inherent limits of the genre. The sentence-by-sentence quality of his words is unrelenting. And, since this is Denis Joh...more
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The title of this lean, mean, exemplar of modern noir comes from a lyric its protagonist overhears -- "Nobody move, nobody get hurt." (It's not clear to me if he overheard the original 1984 Yelloman song, or the 1988 Easy-E version off Eazy-Duz-It -- most likely the latter). Of course, in noir, even if protagonists are existentially stuck in their lives, they are always trying to move. And of course, they get hurt. Here, that role is played by Luntz (a name that in and of itself, tells you prett...more
This book is actually a memoir. I realize that it says "A Novel" on the front and that the book jacket proclaims that it is a "thriller...touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett." So how, you protest, have I arrived at this conclusion? By the time you reach the end of the book you should have come to the same intimate conclusion about Johnson as I have. Johnson, it would seem, needed money for an addition to his home, has fallen off the wagon and has thus plunged back into the...more
Jul 10, 2009
stacy
added it
Of Johnson's work, Jesus' Son is my favorite and Nobody Move is my most recent. I'll have to read a second time to confirm my suspicion that Johnson's humor is bone-deep as is his love for loser protagonists. They come out equal parts do-gooder and total fuck-up.
This book comes off a quick and dirty assignment, something to play at, after years of toil on Tree of Smoke. And I'm still trying to figure its introductory remarks on war.
Anyway, there are plenty of lines to love in Nobody Move. Here a...more
This book comes off a quick and dirty assignment, something to play at, after years of toil on Tree of Smoke. And I'm still trying to figure its introductory remarks on war.
Anyway, there are plenty of lines to love in Nobody Move. Here a...more
This was a damn good read. It combines the cheap thrills and casual violence of a typical noir with the perfectly crafted sentences and deft-characterization found in a literary novel. The book is brief, maybe too brief(my ARC copy was 195 pages set in giant type with massive swathes of blank bordering) but maybe that’s a good thing after Johnson’s most recent door stop of a novel `Tree of Smoke’, a massive, tedious lunge at the great American Novel, that to me, failed miserably. `Nobody Moves’...more
13 likes · like · see review
Apr 08, 2009
Brittany
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Fans of Coen brothers / film noir
Recommended to Brittany by:
Harper C
How I Came To Read This Book: Harper Collins sent it to me woo.
The Plot: Jimmy Luntz is a grifter whose bad luck catches up with him when a man named Gambol shows up to collect on Luntz's gambling debts. Rather than take things lying down, Luntz ends up shooting Gambol and leaving him for dead - and soon it's a high-octane game of cat and mouse with Luntz on the run (with a sexy con artist in tow) and the mafia at his heels.
The Good & The Bad: I can't call this book mass market or literary...more
The Plot: Jimmy Luntz is a grifter whose bad luck catches up with him when a man named Gambol shows up to collect on Luntz's gambling debts. Rather than take things lying down, Luntz ends up shooting Gambol and leaving him for dead - and soon it's a high-octane game of cat and mouse with Luntz on the run (with a sexy con artist in tow) and the mafia at his heels.
The Good & The Bad: I can't call this book mass market or literary...more
So far, so good. Opening line: "Jimmy Luntz had never been to war, but this was the sensation, he was sure of that--eighteen guys in a room. . ." Turns out, they're the Alhambra California Beachcomber Chordsmen, a barbershop group that comes in 17th out of 20 in the choral competition, which is immediately followed by Jimmy's getting hauled off in a copper-colored Cadillac by a henchman who must break Jimmy's leg for not paying a debt, but Jimmy shoots him in the leg instead and escapes for---wh...more
This book's a bright disappointment, a Playboy pastiche of Elmore Leonard. It has sticky passages of hilarity, barbed dialogue as punctured as epigrams, and the usual motley minor misfits entangled by emotional aphasia and pluck. The plot's shot full of holes, sliding off the page like brainbits of a murdered lover, rolling into corners like severed testicles – and what remains by the end manages, after a few raw chortles, to strangle itself with its own colostomy bag.
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I read a library copy of this, and when I first opened it, a bright orange piece of card stock fell out. The card is labeled "Staff Picks," and the handwritten blurb reads, "Pinballing tale of a compulsive gambler who owes money, the loan sharks who want to collect, and a beautiful alcoholic vixen." This sums it up pretty well.
The whole book is fast and fun. I love that every character seems to be going off half-cocked with only about 10% of a plan--there's always some key point being overlooke...more
The whole book is fast and fun. I love that every character seems to be going off half-cocked with only about 10% of a plan--there's always some key point being overlooke...more
Two word review: Very meh.
Unexpected side effect during or after reading: Urge to read a better crime novel.
New thing I learned from reading this book: Singers in barber shop quartets may not be as wholesome as they seem.
General observations: The jacket notes on this book gave me heartburn right off the bat:
"Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Move is at once an homage to and a variation on literary form. It salutes one of our most enduring and popular genres—the...more
Unexpected side effect during or after reading: Urge to read a better crime novel.
New thing I learned from reading this book: Singers in barber shop quartets may not be as wholesome as they seem.
General observations: The jacket notes on this book gave me heartburn right off the bat:
"Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Move is at once an homage to and a variation on literary form. It salutes one of our most enduring and popular genres—the...more
After the epic, messy sprawl of his last book, the ambitious yet uneven Vietnam novel Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson returns to the spare leanness of his best work with this deliberately minor key modern noir. Like my three favorite Johnson books (Angels, Jesus' Son, and Already Dead: A California Gothic), this one is about unsavory characters and societal outcasts getting into trouble. Nobody Move is at once a modern updating of '40s hardboiled crime fiction with nods to Chandler and Hammett and...more
Denis Johnson follows up his massive 2007 National Book Award winner Tree of Smoke with a short burst of crime fiction that is enjoyable if you like DJ or enjoy reading about criminals or sad sacks who get embroiled into a situation that spirals out of control.
That's the gist of Nobody Move. A guy owes money for gambling and gets in hot water when he tries not to pay (it involves bullets) and then hooks up with another woman running foul of the law. The pair attempt to get away without losing t...more
That's the gist of Nobody Move. A guy owes money for gambling and gets in hot water when he tries not to pay (it involves bullets) and then hooks up with another woman running foul of the law. The pair attempt to get away without losing t...more
Ever since I stumbled across Johnson on a list of Chuck Palaniuk's favorite authors & I read Jesus' Son, I've been a fan, mostly and almost entirely because of his writing style, those angry propulsive sentences and that terse and completely believeable dialog among the losers that star in his stories. These are drunks, addicts, lower-middle class folk stuck in lives they want to escape but can't quite figure out how to. In Tree of Smoke he mixed in a few officers and relief workers because...more
Slow beginning. Thought the film noir touches were trite at first, gambler in debt and in trouble, dark lusty lady of mystery, but when pieces start falling into place, it's gets tense, rapid and enthralling. There's Luntz the gambler, Anita the dark beauty, and Gambol and Juarez, the organized crime. There's also some embezzled money and some cool cars. Johnson writes sparsely, precisely. It's like Elmore Leonard with transcendental aftertastes.
There is a really good action scene involving a s...more
There is a really good action scene involving a s...more
If Dennis Johnson‘s Tree of Smoke was a seven course meal (a serious, 600 page National Book Award winner) Nobody Move could be desert–a quick, funny travel guide to toughguyland.
Jimmy Luntz, a loser with a gambling problem (bad combination), owes a gangster money, but manages to shoot the goon who’s trying to collect. Anita’s a self-loathing alcoholic taking the rap for a two million dollar embezzelment, and being dumped by her husband. Naturally, they find each other.
"Why are you with me?"
"I l...more
Jimmy Luntz, a loser with a gambling problem (bad combination), owes a gangster money, but manages to shoot the goon who’s trying to collect. Anita’s a self-loathing alcoholic taking the rap for a two million dollar embezzelment, and being dumped by her husband. Naturally, they find each other.
"Why are you with me?"
"I l...more
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Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He holds a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and has received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer's Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently,...more
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“After the film it was raining, a light steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.”
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