From the National Book Award–winning, bestselling author of Tree of Smoke comes a provocative thriller set in the American West. <... read full description
reviews
Aug 19, 2009
Jessica
rated it: 
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
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(15 people liked it)
Jun 22, 2010
Jim
rated it: 
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 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 More...
4 comments
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Mar 26, 2011
Tyler
rated it:
"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
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(3 people liked it)
Mar 23, 2010
Matt
rated it:
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 someo 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 someo More...
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Jun 13, 2011
Michael
rated it: 
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
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Oct 04, 2011
“These others,” [the Tall Man] told [Anita], “don’t know what they are.” Throughout Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move: A Novel, everything and everyone is questionable. Nothing is as it seems.
Anita Desilvera, who describes herself as “a vagrant, a felon, and a divorcee,” captures the essence of these peculiar characters in this self-examination. However, a vagrant wouldn’t likely have the keys to a suburban home and a Jaguar. Or would she? It wouldn’t be probable that a felon be the wif More...
Anita Desilvera, who describes herself as “a vagrant, a felon, and a divorcee,” captures the essence of these peculiar characters in this self-examination. However, a vagrant wouldn’t likely have the keys to a suburban home and a Jaguar. Or would she? It wouldn’t be probable that a felon be the wif More...
Jun 16, 2011
Carly
rated it:
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 ab 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 ab More...
Feb 19, 2011
Kirk
rated it:
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."
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(8 people liked it)
Dec 09, 2010
Erik
rated it:
Johnson has been lending us his tenaciously dark-humored fiction since the early ‘70s,(you may be familiar with his short story collection,Jesus’ Son, which was later made into a film). His latest darkly-comic, noir-ish crime romp features many of his trademark characters, (drunks, gambling addicts, debt-collecting thugs, and sexy and infectiously dangerous women). The novel begins with Jimmy Luntz, a down-and-out gambler, ferociously fretting his meeting with a thug named Gambol, who is out col
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Jun 22, 2010
Matthew
rated it:
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 t 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 t More...
Jun 19, 2010
Steve
rated it:
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 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 More...
May 29, 2010
Ben
rated it:
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
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May 05, 2010
Tony
rated it:
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, tell
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Dec 30, 2009
Michael
rated it: 
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
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Jul 10, 2009
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 lo 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 lo More...
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Jul 01, 2009
Tara
rated it:
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"
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May 20, 2009
D.E.
rated it:
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’
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16 comments
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(13 people liked it)
Apr 08, 2009
Brittany
rated it:
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 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 More...
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Aug 12, 2009
Susan
rated it:
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 escap
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May 15, 2009
Jim
rated it: 
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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Feb 01, 2011
Nicole
rated it:
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 alway 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 alway More...
Jun 18, 2009
Kemper
rated it:
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 s 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 s More...
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Nov 27, 2010
Josh
rated it:
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
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Jan 15, 2010
Joshua
rated it:
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 with 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 with More...
Aug 16, 2009
Nick
rated it:
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 it w
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Jun 13, 2009
Christopher
rated it:
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 sc More...
There is a really good action sc More...
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Jan 09, 2012
Chris
rated it:
Next up. Probably begin tonight or tomorrow. A writer friend of mine has chastised me for my less than wholehearted approval for "Tree of Smoke" so I'm going back to give DJ another shot. I did love "Jesus' Son". Still haven't really started yet. Been reading stories and articles in Harpers and The New Yorker. Catching up... Including a story by Joyce Carol Oates. I had to skim to the end. Been there and done that with her before. Tonight... And now it's tomorrow and I finish
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Jul 21, 2010
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.
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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.
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Jun 01, 2009
Bookmarks Magazine
rated it:
Critics were puzzled by Johnson's choice to follow up the award-winning Tree of Smoke with a lightweight genre piece like Nobody Move. While most viewed the novel as a laudable exercise in style and technique, a few considered it a literary side stepóa minor work by an acclaimed writer. Taking a few pages from such crime story greats as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Johnson has produced quintessential noirówith snappy dialogue, violence, sex, and a wry sense of humor. Though Newsday com
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May 03, 2009
Mike
rated it:
Lean yet prone to intriguing distractions, full of grit and a whole lot of bad things happening to bad people but still marked by Johnson's typical empathy for fuckheads. It may bother some that this is an unabashed Popov shot of a crime novel, a little cheaper-tasting than you might have expected in such fancy trappings from a fancyboy big-shot, the sort of thing that could have held its own in a squeaking wire-frame paperback display squeezed in between copies of pulp writers no one but the s
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