Spare the banter, please

Jacket Copy's ongoing conversation about Denis Johnson's noir serial "Nobody Move" continues....

The challenge of writing crime fiction on deadline is dependent on one's ability to perfect the great lost art of witty banter. I found this out a few months ago when I was charged with writing an entire 300-page novel in three months — this from a writer who took two years to write a novel that clocked in at just under 200 pages and about 10 years to write a story collection that is on the bright side of 175 (though, to my credit, there are 12 entirely different stories there, so that's something) — and spent the first month doing things like playing Scrabulous on Facebook, googling the symptoms for various diseases I was certain I was coming down with and, strangely, completely dedicating myself to physical fitness for the first time in about, oh, 10 years. Maybe 15.

At any rate, those three months became two months, and I didn’t have a word on the page, so I decided I just needed to get people talking and eventually things would sort themselves out and I'd find that elusive flow. What I learned was that, unlike in my literary fiction, where characters utter a few lines of subtextual dialogue that then leads them to ruminate internally on the way their parents/husbands/wives/children/Elvis ruined their lives and brings them to a dreadful moment of self-realization, in crime fiction half the joy is pretending you're conjuring Nick and Nora Charles, where every line of dialogue is loaded with conflict, sexuality, violence, hubris and, periodically, a shred of evidence.

To get to those shreds, however, you sometimes end up going on and on, falling in love with the way your characters sound; in my case, I was thrilled by this new toughness that was coming out, the muscularity of the sentences, the staccato beats. (The other half of the fun, incidentally — and particularly if, like me, you've spent the balance of your career writing about the sad passages of memory and trauma — is blowing stuff up.) In a perfect scenario, you then go back and cut away the excess and find those nuggets of conversation that convey character, reveal your character's emotional state, deliver conflict and move the story forward ... while still being witty.

(More after the jump)

Mastering the situation

I really thought the second installment was going to be the problem one, but, as David has noted, Denis Johnson sails through without a hitch.

In his neat little book on Dickens, G.K. Chesterton (himself no mean hand at the thriller, the detective story and all manner of genre narrative) noted that Dickens, as his career went along, became a master of pace and delay. Rather than just piling everything in, and throwing ever more narrative logs on the fire (the equivalent of Chandler having men come through the door with guns in their hands), Dickens gained the confidence to take his time. And that's what Johnson is doing here. There's not much action in this installment but a lot more situation and character depth and, as David says, really sizzling dialogue.

(what surprised Richard Rayner, after the jump)

So Cal bookseller nominees announced

The Southern California Independent Booksellers Association has announced the nominees for its 2008 awards; all the authors are based in Southern California. I don't remember anything like this in Pittsburgh -- do other regional associations of booksellers have similar awards?

Congratulations to all the nominees. Links to the LA Times reviews are below.

Fiction:
"City of Thieves" by David Benioff
"Winged Creatures" by Roy Freirich
"Imagine Me and You" by Billy Mernit
"Harry, Revised" by Mark Sarvas
"The God of War" by Marisa Silver

T. Jefferson Parker Award For Mystery:
"Chasing Darkness" by Robert Crais
"Snitch Jacket" by Christopher Goffard
"Oscar Season" by Mary McNamara
"Judas Horse" by April Smith 
"Hollywood Crows" by Joseph Wambaugh
"Incomplete Revenge" by Jacqueline Winspear

Nonfiction and children's book nominees after the jump.

Denis Johnson's gym bag

Anita might distract the cops with her door-blowing smile, but she’s gone by the time two FBI agents show up at the hotel room. They’re the ones who tell Jimmy that Anita embezzled the $2.3 million. They’re looking for it.

Jimmy’s on his way out. He’s holding Gambol’s gym bag -- which holds Gambol’s big, inconvenient shotgun -- and tells the agents he’s got his own clothes in it, is all. The FBI agents -- who go on to search the hotel room for Anita’s embezzled money, or clues to it -- let Jimmy walk away. They never check inside his bag.

Strains belief, right?

But does it matter? That's after the jump.

Whole lotta shaking in books

The longlist for the Man Booker Prize has been announced: a baker's dozen of must-read fiction for 2008.

In the tradition of the very dead diarist Samuel Pepys, George Orwell will start blogging Aug. 9.

Literary tattoos get no respect from Gawker.

We have lots of respect for Stephen King, whose new novel "N." is being accompanied by this animated episodic series, which began Monday.

The journey(s) of 1000 Journals are chronicled in a new documentary opening in San Francisco.

Independent online journal The Quarterly Conversation has a new look for its new issue.

The author tracking/stalking site Booktour.com has a new look too.

In honor of today's earthquake, an excerpt from "The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith" after the jump.

Nobody Move: We're back ...

Last month, Jacket Copy opened an ongoing conversation about Denis Johnson's noir serial "Nobody Move," which is being published in four parts in Playboy. Part 2 has just hit the stands, and now we pick up where we left off. ...

Toward the end of our initial discussion of "Nobody Move," Richard Rayner noted that the real challenge of the project would not be in the first installment but in the second. The opening section was all about the setup. Part 2 would be where we would see whether Johnson's serial had legs.

Rayner's right, of course, as anyone who's seen this season's premiere of "Mad Men" can attest. And Part 2 of "Nobody Move" really delivers — moving the story along, offering a number of classically weird Johnson moments and, most important, having a lot of fun with the conventions of the genre, the hard-boiled talk and attitude of noir.

Johnson opens Part 2 the morning after Part 1 ends, in the Log Inn Motel, where Jimmy Luntz has just slept with Anita Desilvera, a woman so out of his league that he has to keep looking at her to make sure she is real. There's a brief encounter with the cops, which Anita defuses through sheer animal lust: "At that moment," Johnson writes, "Anita came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her black hair slicked back, and flashed a smile that would have blown the doors off Jesus Christ."

"Blown the doors off Jesus Christ"? How's that for hard-boiled? It doesn't even matter that Johnson's image makes no sense — last time I looked, Jesus didn't have any doors.

In the beginning...

At the dawn of every book there is a sentence, a sentence that grabs the reader or reaches out tenderly toward him or throws a fireball at his face. If all it does is just sit there on the page, it's not doing its job, and it won't get much attention. At least not from io9, which today looks at some stellar first sentences of science fiction; William Gibson and Rudy Rucker and Orson Scott Card get nods. Dan Brown, too:

There are a lot of opening sentences that announce the start of a rollicking yarn, with an action sentence. Like this, from Dan Brown's Angels & Demons: "Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own." Boom! A guy's flesh is burning. It's exciting!

A couple of years ago, the literary journal American Book Review was hot on the case, and came up with its own 100 best first sentences. The list tends toward the iconic, memorable and short:

• Call me Ishmael. ("Moby-Dick," Herman Melville).
• Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. ("Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov)
• All this happened, more or less. ("Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt Vonnegut)
• You better not never tell nobody but God. ("The Color Purple," Alice Walker)
• A screaming comes across the sky. ("Gravity's Rainbow," Thomas Pynchon)

There are many paragraph-length sentences, too, most notably #95, Raymond Federman's "Double or Nothing," which with 396 words is the longest of the bunch.

The short sentences stand out in their lack of context. Melville didn't write "'Call me Ishmael,'" he said as he hurled the harpoon." Walker doesn't tell us who's talking, but we know right away that we're being let in on a secret. Vonnegut leads with a lie, Pynchon with disorientation. And Nabokov slips from words to lust in an instant. Maybe what it takes to make a sentence great is a kind of spare universality.

But then, the two lists intersect with a sentence that's specific to the point of becoming dated. From William Gibson, no less.

It's after the jump.

What Los Angeles is reading

At an alley off Cahuenga filled with people who waited for the Hotel Cafe to open for the monthly reading series Tongue and Groove. These well-heeled loiterers told Jacket Copy what they've been reading, both good and not-so-good.

   

In case the books go by too fast, a list is after the jump.

Carolyn Kellogg

Book highlights this week

We announce changes in book coverage here at the L.A. Times. Online, Books is a good destination; Jacket Copy too.

Michael Chabon talks about genre(s), and Jackie Collins talks about success.

The Hero Complex blog covers Comic-Con.

Tim Rutten reviews the memoir Still Alive! A Temporary Condition by Herbert Gold, and Heller McAlpin looks at Doris Lessing's fictionalized memoir Alfred & Emily. 

David Ulin reviews the story collection Lost in Uttar Pradesh by Evan S. Connell.

James Thurber's children's books are celebrated, as are the birthdays of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler.

We find some bookshelves that are really secret doors (not secret anymore).

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Writing and running

In his review for us of Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running," Peter Terzian writes:

Oates’ essay aside, the literature of running is as thin as a mesh singlet. Running pops up in fiction and poetry from time to time, from Homer to John Updike, but the sport doesn’t easily lend itself to the dramatic. The vagaries of weather, the joint pains and the repetition of putting one foot in front of the other can’t compete with the traded blows of the boxing ring or a home run.

Just a note: Last year, Running magazine hailed the return of John L. Parker with "Again to Carthage," a sequel of sorts to his 1970s cult classic "Once a Runner." It is considered a classic among runners. What other literature is there? What comes to mind is Alan Sillitoe's story “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” which is easy to recall because of the title. What else? There's Paul Maurer's "The Gift," also Benjamin Cheever's "Strides." But, as Terzian writes, much of the fiction, especially, is well below the mainstream radar, making it difficult to find.

Another interesting point that Terzian emphasizes: Writing and running are apt parallels. Despite the clubs that gather runners or writers together, despite the illusion of competition that a massive marathon suggests (see above) or a longlist for a book prize, both are lone activities. That is their essence. For that matter, the same is true of reading. We're all runners.

Nick Owchar

Photo credit: Grandma's Marathon, Clint Austin/AP