Reviewing the Reviewers: Another Postmodern Review of Denis Johnson

Biblioklept has a interesting review of Denis Johnson's Nobody Move. Their review makes some similar comparisons to recent postmodern crime novels, and it even picks up on the theme of subverting the traditional crime novel. However Biblioklept sees Nobody Move as a great or at least a really good book, and I can't agree. Here is their explanation,

Nobody Move is fantastic as a genre exercise, witty, dark, lean, and hard-boiled, transcending the bad or formulaic writing that can plague the genre’s novels but never trying to transcend its tropes. Put another way, Johnson here demonstrates that he can master a genre that is not his, and that he can do it under the constraints of space and time. That’s quite a feat, if you think about it, especially if you compare Nobody Move to Thomas Pynchon's recent genre exercise, Inherent Vice, or the detective-centered works of Jonathan Lethem like Motherless Brooklyn and Gun, With Occasional Music. Pynchon’s work is in many ways a covert, loving goof on the genre, but it’s still more or less a “Thomas Pynchon” book. Lethem likes the idea of writing crime noir, but he wants to subvert it, mash it up with sci-fi, see it as a form of post-modern allegory... But I think contrasting what they are trying to do with what Johnson is trying to do is instructive. There’s a purity to Nobody Move, to its utter willingness to simply be what it is–and many folks won’t like that; they may even accuse Johnson of slumming. Perhaps they think it’s easy to write a tight, funny crime novel.

I, simply, disagree with a couple of points that they make. First I don't really think the novel is that well written or that funny. While the novel has a few good gags it largely seems to fall flat. Its characters are more sad than humorous. Denis Johnson is too interested in lowlifes and scum, which would be fine if the characters were shone as actual characters, but instead the reader is given sad caricatures, that Nobody Move cruelly plays with. Even the few upper class characters are still shown as seedy and true lowlifes, which deserve and will probably get no empathy from most readers. While the novel borders on black humor, I struggled to care enough to laugh, and perhaps that is because of the passivity of the main character. In my main review I called him an anti-antihero, but perhaps even more fitting is the idea of post-postmodern hero.

In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest  this idea is outlined in a strange way, seemingly as a joke. An essay that Hal wrote when he was young is shared with the reader; it is about crime dramas, and in the last paragraph it projects a Post-Postmodern drama, in which the hero will do nothing at all. This passive hero is Jimmy Luntz, who as the Biblioklept review points out is completely and perfectly described by his name. Nobody Move is a cruel, nihilistic postmodern landscape for a passive hero like Jimmy to be placed, yet that is exactly where Johnson puts Luntz. I could do nothing but shake my head, and look sadly on at his inaction. This didn't make for an enjoyable read exactly, but it did work well as an allegory. This point flies in the face of Biblioklept's review of course, but I guess that whats makes this post interesting.

Nobody Move isn't a bad book, but I also must disagree with the generally positive light they give the novel. I think it is something that maybe worth read--though more for someone interested in its postmodern allegory than for a Denis Johnson fan. My disagreements aside, Biblioklept wrote a great review, and to anyone who is interested I highly recommend their different opinion as a great read.

Biblioklept

Denis Johnson's Nobody Move: Failure or Perfect Postmodern Allegory?

ree of Smoke, Denis Johnson's last novel was about war, and Nobody Move starts with a musing on it. As far as I can tell this is were the similarity stops. I haven't read Tree of Smoke, but from what I have heard it is a dense 600 plus page psychological novel about the Vietnam War. Nobody Move isn't any of those things. Instead it's a slim crime novel, weighing in around 200 pages.

The (more) Traditional Reading

Nobody Move seems like a hard-boiled detective story. It has all the Camaros and Cadillacs. The alcohol. The one word name (semi) foreign villains. The beautiful woman. The weapons and violence, yet it never comes together. Without a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe the novel lacks something central. The genre seems to normally fall together around this semi-moral, somewhat ethical, and normally violent central character, but there is no such central character or in fact center at all. The closest thing this novel has is Jimmy Luntz a gambling, barbershop chorus lowlife, who "undoubtedly possesses several [Hawaiian shirts]" (9). Additionally the novel seems to subvert every attempt at tension, and there is no mystery. The reader from the beginning meets most of the players, knows where the money is, and can easily guess who will live and who will die.

The question then is what exactly is Denis Johnson's novel. It has all of the normal props of a pulpy crime novel; it was even published serially in Playboy, but it clearly isn't that simple. Even the moments where it attempts the voice of a hard-boiled detective story with sleazy dialogue, politically incorrect statements, and generic stereotypes--the female lead being a beautiful alcoholic Indian and the main villain is named Juarez--it simultaneously subverts these ideas--the Indian is wealthy but married to the corrupt district attorney and the villain named Juarez is actually Arab. These ideas corrupt another traditional element of the crime novel, and seem to be making fun of it in the same way that Jimmy Luntz seems to be a mocking of the hard-boiled detective. With this character as a central force the novel borders on parody, yet it never seems to arrive. It tries to be cruel, not farcical. 

The novels structuring around Luntz is only somewhat true. While he is the main character, the events often don't include or affect him. Additionally the novel has a random and almost coincidental feel to it, leading to the lack of suspense or tension mentioned above. This structure seems to seems to fit a Jungian idea of Synchronicity, that seemingly random events are brought together by meaning. Anita Desilvera, the beautiful female lead, meets Jimmy while she is running from something just as dangerous. Their characters match almost too perfectly. He owes money, while she, supposedly, just stole 2.3 million, and his lack of drinking is made up for by her "drinking like an Indian," and they even see the same movie, The Last Real Champ, separately. Finally, they find themselves at "Feather Fucking River" where others are hiding from the same one named villains. However there is only one problem with this explanation for the novels lack of organization: the word meaning.

The Postmodern Reading

The novel seems to reject the idea of meaning completely. In the Jungian sense, meaning is too hopeful. The novel instead is puts forth a bleak, meaningless world-view. While from a traditional perspective the novel seems like a failure, perhaps a parody with no point or simply a bad take on a now traditional genre, but from a postmodern perspective the novel reads almost as a treatise on the postmodern world. There is no meaning in Johnson's novel because there is no meaning in the world. Nothing is explained. Nothing is gained. Nothing is lost.

Additionally we can see some of the others ideas of the novel line up perfectly with the postmodern ethos. The novel is a poor copy a genre, which is a poor copy of real life. This example of simulacrum is defined almost exactly by Baudrillard in Simulacrum and Simulation. The characters in Nobody Move are supposed to be poor copies of this no longer purely fake or falsified copies of humanity, but instead they are copies of copies. Sam Spade is in many ways an anti-hero. He is violent and seems to care purely about his self-preservation, but in his stories he usually still manages to make positive decisions, help people, and be honestly likable. Jimmy Luntz is more of an anti-anti-hero. He is a misfit. A gambler who accidentally shoots a gangster and spends the rest of the novel running. By the end of the book he is far away from the 2.3 million dollars everyone is after, about to fly off of a bridge, and most readers will probably be glad to get rid of him.

Similarly Jimmy Luntz role as an anti-anti-hero removes him from the center of the novel. Instead there is no character the reader cares about at the novels center. This de-centering of the world again fits postmodernism. Instead of a single defining character or meaning or thought, the novel is a multiplicity of characters none of whom are endearing, none of whom are worthy. With this multiplicity comes a seeming randomness to what occurs in the novel. Events are unexplained. Violence is common, expected even.

In this way it is similar to a Cormac McCarthy novel like No Country for Old Men, which offers the metaphor of chance as something to organize its incessant violence. Yet McCarthy's primarily metaphysical novel is a different animal than Nobody Move, which is more interested in tying together the violence with jokes than metaphor. That said McCarthy's choice of metaphor seems to be the best organizing principle for the novel. McCarthy's novel suggests that chance is the only thing left, and this idea seems to present the world as changed. It also is a novel defining the postmodern world.

Yet, McCarthy's Chigurh is a death-like figure, who is more metaphor than character, carries out the random acts of violence that define the postmodern world. Jimmy Luntz is not like Chigurh. Instead he is more of a passive victim of the random world than its tool.

Conclusion

I could continue to vehemently defend how Denis Johnson's novel is a perfect allegory for the postmodern world--I've already made most of the argument. Yet, I'm not sure it's worth it. The best postmodern novels exist first on their merits as great novels, and only secondly on their postmodern themes or metaphors. There are a few novels which have been great books and have played with the genre of crime fiction and postmodern themes: Micheal Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union or Paul Auster's City of Glass or even Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, yet all of these novels exist as great books, whether or not the reader cares about their postmodern ideology. Nobody Move simply isn't that good. It is a victim of its own allegory, and it therefore fails in its most important role to be an enjoyable and thought provoking read.

uring the last few years I have been focused on reading the old, the well-worn, and the classic. Whether for the pursuit of my English degree or on my own, I only read lines scoured again and again by those readers before me. Yet this habit never matched my consumption of other media. While reading old books I would crave new music, seeking it out obsessively. While with movies I at least offer a glance at recent releases, yet I never have offered contemporary literature this common courtesy.

Somehow this part of my relationship with literature has long been overlooked. I hope to change that in some ways this year, and this blog is part of that project. 

I'm hoping with this blog to throw myself into the sea of newly released literature, while occasionally coming up to breath with another type of cultural artifact. I hope to keep this blog as something personal and interpretative, and while this will bring with it the necessary amount literary theory, it will not be my goal to simply evaluate the quality of what I read. In this way my goal is not to review but to add my personal critical opinion to the ever growing world of literary thought. That said I want to be able to vehemently defend my opinions from those who disagree, and by throwing my hat into the online critical ring I hope to be challenged by those with different backgrounds and opinions.