NOBODY MOVE, by Denis Johnson; Farras, Straus, Giroux; 242 pages; $23.
Literary writers often are attracted to genre fiction, mostly, I suspect, because the pay is better and it looks easy. It’s not, but it looks that way. Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, certainly among the worst books ever written by a major writer — there are a lot of late Mailer books vying for that title — should have disabused anyone of trying it, but writers as various as Jim Harrison have dipped a toe gingerly into what amounts to publishing’s Golden Ghetto.
Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move is certainly better than Tough Guys Don’t Dance, but almost anything is. The publishers invoke Chandler and Hammett, two legs of the Holy Trinity, but, in its artful use of dialogue and utterly low-life characters, Nobody Move is actually closer to Elmore Leonard. There also are some touches of James Ellroy in the clipped, staccato storytelling, although Johnson is so indifferent toward action that it’s sometimes difficult to figure out exactly who dies and how.
Jimmy Luntz is an unlikely tough guy. For one thing, he sings in a barbershop chorus; mainly, he’s the dope, the well-meaning guy who isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. Luntz owes money to a bad man named Juarez, who sends a man named Gambol to collect the debt. Luntz gets lucky and shoots Gambol. Unluckily, he doesn’t kill him.
On the run, Luntz hooks up with Anita at closing time in a bar. Anita is a knockout, and Luntz isn’t. He uses dialogue from movies as pick-up lines. Anita has seen the same movies he has, but goes to bed with him anyway. Anita has issues of her own.
“Are you a loser?” she asks him.
“Not when I’m lucky.”
“When was a guy like you ever lucky?”
Anita’s ex-husband has embezzled $2.3 million and hung it on her. This puts Anita in a very bad mood, which results in a fabulous climactic scene in which she grabs a dying judge’s colostomy bag and pistol-whips him with it. This woman is serious.
Making an ominous entrance in the middle of the book is a guy named The Tall Man, who wears a hat that obscures much of his face, which is a good thing. “He stood under the ceiling light with his hat tipped forward and his face in a shadow and a hooked pinky traveling toward one of his nostrils, if he had nostrils.”
The Tall Man is so scary people mostly just look at his hands, but even the Tall Man is scared by Anita. “We’re out of our depth,” he says about her.
What Johnson — winner of the National Book Award for Tree of Smoke, and author of some other fine novels such as Jesus’ Son and Fiskadoro — does is set a bunch of people after that $2.3 million, in and around the down-at-the-mouth and unglamorous background of Bakersfield, Calif.
Johnson’s literary bona fides almost never get in the way of the grimly funny goings on, except in the occasional high-toned phrase that doesn’t belong — a bullet wound is referred to as “the purple lipless exploded mouth in his flesh,” which is so self-conscious even Chandler wouldn’t have ventured near it at the end of a month-long binge. Elmore Leonard would slap Johnson with a colostomy bag for just writing the sentence, let alone using it.
Otherwise, not bad at all. In fact, pretty good.