Let's try this again…
A review of Denis Johnson's Nobody Move
(Note: I originally claimed that there had been very little prehype surrounding the release of this book. Turns out I just don't know where to look for prehype. Mea culpa)
Denis Johnson is one of the few fiction writers today with the maddening ability to move seamlessly between writing styles in a manner that doesn't come across as gimmicky. You've got the wonderfully bleak Tree of Smoke, which won the National Book Award in 2007; Jesus' Son, which manages to merge the ambitions of poetic prose and screwball comedy; the dystopian Fiskadoro; and academia. However, as many Johnson fans will attest, it isn't so much the case that the author jumps from style to style as much as it is that he seems to embrace all styles, all genres, as appendages of some larger indefinable whole. His comfort zone has no boundary which, for those of us foolhardy enough to have made a career out of writing, is both demoralizing and phenomenally invigorating.
In Nobody Move, Johnson throws his hat into the pulp/crime ring, and as one might expect, the result is spectacularly fun and moving. The book, while grim and delightfully blunt and carved from a very Chandleresque model, somehow manages to sidestep all (or at least most) of the cringe-inducing clichés associated with the genre, while still employing those customary guns-and-gangsters tropes that make guys like, say, Elmore Leonard great guilty pleasure reading. Part of this is due to the author's understated prose style, the Hemingwayish sparseness that allows the characters' actions to speak for themselves; those brave souls who made it through Tree of Smoke with their faith in the human spirit still intact can certainly attest to this. In this regard, Nobody Move is certainly no exception.
On the surface, the novel's protagonist Jimmy Luntz is the prototypical crime novel Good Guy: a down-on-his-luck gambler with a sharp tongue and a fondness for Hawaiian shirts. He even sings in a barbershop chorus. Why a barbershop chorus is anyone's guess. Johnson never actually ties this particular character trait into the rest of the story; Luntz just happens to sing in a barbershop chorus, end of story. Which is kind of brilliant, inasmuch as it's one of the most of literarily unusual things about him and, perhaps not coincidentally, the thing to which Johnson devotes the least attention. This is one of the many ways in which the author crafts wonderful characters in all his books: the most ludicrous details and qualities always take a backseat to the more commonplace ones, which teases out the reader's curiosity.
To be sure, Luntz is not, by any conventional standard, a decent person; he's only Good insomuch as he spends most of the book being chased by the less-dimensional but equally fascinating Gambol, who Luntz mistakenly shoots in the leg at the beginning of the book. The reader isn't rooting for Luntz because of his bumbling Forest Gumpishness; he/she is rooting for him in spite of it. In fact, between Luntz and Gambol, it is nearly impossible to distinguish which character is "Good" and which is "Bad," beyond the fact that the former occupies the central role.
This is what makes Johnson's characters so compelling: even the flat ones seem to know that they're flat. They possess an ethical awareness that flies in the face of the traditional crime novel formula. The book may masquerade as a disposably fun crime novel, but on a deeper level Johnson isn't concerned with the concept of Good vs. Bad so much as he with what these ideas even mean.
[image error]What I mean is: there's never a longing on the part of the reader for anyone to get what he or she deserves, primarily because we don't know what they deserve. Because really: what do barbershop chorus vocalists and murderous heroines and gay saloon proprietors deserve? What fate would be appropriate for Juarez, the shadowy dealer for whom Gambol collects; or for Anita Desilvera, Luntz's protagonist counterpart/unwitting-victim-in-a-financial-scheme-turned-murderer? In the context of the book, these just aren't relevant questions. What is relevant are the ways in which these characters slyly maneuver the strict parameters of the genre without being overshadowed by the clunky momentum of plot. While there's very little love or even and inkling of friendliness between any of the major characters, there really isn't that much animosity, either. At least, not as one might expect. Even Gambol, in his efforts to track down Luntz, makes it clear that it's just business, nothing more, as evidenced in the opening scene in which the former confronts the latter in order to collect on a debt (this is also the scene that sets the plot in motion):
"So hey," Gambol said, "you are in a barbershop chorus."
"What are you doing here?"
"I cam here to see you."
"No, but really."
"Really. Believe it."
"All the way to Bakersfield?"
That lucky feeling. It had let him down before.
"I'm parked over here," Gambol said.
Gambol was driving a copper-colored Cadillac Brougham with soft white leather seats. "There's a button on the side of the seat," he said, "to adjust it how you want."
This is how the book distinguishes itself from the typical crime novel track: whereas in most books of its ilk the tension arises from the question of how the Good Guy is going to thwart the Bad Guy, the principle questions in Nobody Move are a bit more complex: Who, exactly, is supposed to get thwarted, and why? Action is a secondary consideration here; Johnson's focus, as always, is the characters, which despite occupying very customary roles, bring with them a depth that renders all the guns and death and sex as minor footnotes in what winds up as a very dramatically engaging novel.
