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)

Nobody Move: stay tuned for next month

Richard's comments about the next installment of "Nobody Move" seem like a perfect place to wrap up phase one of our conversation, and look ahead to phase two.

So nobody move -- we'll be back next month to discuss the second part of Denis Johnson's serial novel, and to see where the story goes from here.

David L. Ulin

The medium and the message?

I first read Denis Johnson's "Angels" when I was in graduate school in Amherst, Mass., the novel having been loaned to me by someone housesitting for an older professor. I was only 23 and blown away. I knew all those people in "Angels," though I wished I hadn't grown up with them, and I was stunned that someone had written a novel so deeply immersed inside their heads.

So reading this first installment of "Nobody Move" is strange because, once again, we're completely immersed, and it's a good thing. Since I've been reading a lot of noir lately — my favorite being that of Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley and now Raymond Chandler, because of Judith Freeman's fine nonfiction book about him — this was perfect.

And it's so damn funny. The dialogue is funny, perfect just like Chandler's. The details are hilarious — the log motel and the restaurants and the river.

But I agree with several things Carolyn and David have pointed out. First, why can't we see the scene where Luntz shoots Gambol? Why would Gambol have been on that kind of ride and let him put the gun in the glove compartment in the first place? (Again, I wish I didn't know people like this, or rides like this.) If Gambol's supposed to be too tired to do it right, I'd like to know.

Second, the whole serialization thing is strange. I love the way the headline trumpets On Deadline!  Publishing History Begins Now.

But not really, given Dickens and Hardy and so many others, including the recent novels serialized in the New York Times Magazine.

Anyway, a month will pass, and I'll read again passionately, because I love Johnson and his style and his inimitable humor, which is beyond black and into some other netherworldly shade. But I probably will have to keep this story around.

Which brings me to Richard's comment about his son wanting the magazine. Yeah, only I live in a house with three feminist teenage girls, all of whom are taller than me. All very beautiful. All of whom gave me the most dubious, deadly looks when I mentioned that inside the FedEx envelope was Playboy. "I tell my grad students some of the best fiction in history has been published in Playboy," I said. "We just read a T.C. Boyle story in class that was originally in here."

They gave me the classic teenage answer. "Why?" Deadpan.

When I showed the cover to them (one is a college girl who reads Details, Esquire and about 10 other magazines and whose favorite magazine in the world is GQ), they all said quizzically, "People still read that?"   

I cut the story out and threw the rest of the pages away, mostly because the  cartoons were so bad. But I can't wait to see what happens with Anita. She's way better than a cartoon.

Susan Straight

A man in a barbershop vest walks into a bar

I wasn't sure what to expect of a serial hard-boiled noir in Playboy from Denis Johnson, but it wasn't a guy in a checkered vest singing barbershop. Lutz starts out as an anti-noir character, the kind of nebbish Bogart played at so well in the bookstore in "The Big Sleep." But of course, Bogart was still Philip Marlowe behind the facade, and similarly, Luntz isn't a putz underneath, at least not a wimpy one. We don't see the scene where he shoots the much-bigger Gambol — an interesting omission, evoked only by the wonderful passage Richard cites — but we wind up convinced that he's got the guts to take action.

I'm not sure what purpose the barbershop bit serves, other than to give readers an early misimpression of Luntz, and to stick him in that goofy getup for the violent and seductive scenes that follow. At this point, I find it a little hard to believe that gambler Luntz would join a barbershop group, and I hope there's some narrative payoff. I don't want it just to provide a quirky, Tarantino-like juxtaposition; I want it to make some kind of twisted sense.

Maybe that kind of tension — how can this fit? — is what keeps a reader hooked between serial installments. Sure, we're curious about Gambol's fate, and what will happen between Luntz and Anita, but it's the question of whether the author will pull everything together that keeps us intrigued. Sometimes I wonder whether Dickens threw in a random character every now and then just to keep things interesting, challenging himself to make sense of everything in his allotted space (a mere 18 episodes — 900 pages).

David points out that the dialogue doesn't always work, but I disagree. I love Johnson's characters' crosstalk — often they seem to be in two entirely separate conversations. And it's not like the characters don't notice. "This is starting to sound like one of those messed-up conversations," Anita says to Luntz. As both David and Richard have pointed out, in moments like this, it seems as if Johnson is having some fun.

Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Tammy Green via Flickr

Dickens, Collins ... Denis Johnson?

There’s something odd about the idea, isn’t there? That’s to say, the form of the serial novel doesn’t have the currency it did when Charles Dickens (above, left) and Wilkie Collins (above, right) were banging out monthly installments against a deadline for those magazines that Dickens ran and eventually owned. Such an undertaking has a gimmicky feel, and, in the case of the recent John Banville/Benjamin Black story in the New York Times Magazine, we were faced with a definitely wonky widget.

That said, the combination of Denis Johnson and Playboy feels much more promising. Was he winking in the direction of his own book, "Stars at Noon," when, early on in this first extract, a character says in a bit of dialogue: "Almost noon?" As usual, Johnson takes characters who start at the end of their tethers, a character situation that lends itself naturally toward noir and the pursuit thriller. Which is obviously, I hope, what we’re getting here — Denis Johnson channeling Elmore Leonard, with bits of "The Sopranos" thrown in, and making the gumbo his own.

For me, the thing got going with the scene break from the car so we get the look back at what just happened: "Standing at the pay phone, Jimmy Luntz punched a nine and a one and stopped. He couldn’t hear the dial tone. His ears still rang. That old Colt revolver made a bang that slapped you silly." It’s a lovely piece of writing, delivering a narrative surprise with observational acuity and making us smile besides.

Then there’s the scene where Luntz is trying to tie the tourniquet on the leg of the guy he’s just shot. "With surprising energy, Gambol suddenly tossed away his white hat. The wind caught it, and it sailed a dozen yards into the trees. Then he seemed to lose consciousness." He’s such a good writer. The sex scene at the end was great, and I look forward to seeing what Anita Desilvera gets up to with those Magnums she has stashed in the trunk of her car. Somehow the two main characters, Luntz and Anita, made me think of the kids in "Angels," Johnson’s first novel, now grown up in some spectacularly damaged way. At this point I’m definitely along for the ride — but then the set-up is probably the easiest bit of what Johnson is attempting here.

My 13-year old blinked when he saw me reading Playboy. "Hey, can I borrow that after you?" he said. He said he’d check out Denis Johnson too.

Richard Rayner

Serial killer: Denis Johnson’s 'Nobody Move'

Editor's note: On Friday, Playboy published the first section of Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move,” a serialized work of fiction that will come out in four parts. Jacket Copy will review “Nobody Move,” installment by installment; below, our take on Part 1.

My wife is appalled at Denis Johnson. “Why Playboy?” she wants to know. She’s referring, of course, to the venue for Johnson’s latest project, “Nobody Move,” a 40,000-word “novel” that the magazine is publishing as a serial in four installments; the first, in the July issue, has just come out.

As for me, I’m more interested in the way “Nobody Move” might help further eclipse the line between mass culture and literature, between the throwaway nature of periodicals and the lasting weight of art. Although serials are not as uncommon as they once were — see Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City,” Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Stephen King’s “The Green Mile” and Michael Chabon’s “Gentlemen of the Road” — they require novelists who can think like journalists, who can write on deadline, who aren’t afraid to make a mess.

This is cool, exhilarating even, especially in a world in which literary culture is often far too insular, like a form of trivial pursuit. Johnson is one of those rare writers who wants to walk both sides of the line here, to go after a mass readership with work that challenges at every turn. That’s one of the things that attracts me to “Nobody Move,” the idea of Johnson’s bleakly existential vision woven in amid the naked women and advice columns on how to live the good life, as if he were the voice of the collective unconscious — or, more accurately, of the collective id.

Not only that, but “Nobody Move” comes billed as a noir, that darkest of American genres, the literary equivalent of the blues.

Watch this space: Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson's last book, Tree of Smoke, won the National Book Award. Now, reports the New York Times, his new novel, Nobody Move, will appear in four monthly installments in Playboy, beginning with the July 2008 issue, which hits newsstands today.

Playboy's too smart to make Nobody Move available on its website; the idea is to sell magazines, after all. But if you're interested in what Johnson is up to, we'll have the story covered right here. Over the next four months, I'll be reviewing each installment on Jacket Copy as it comes out. In addition, we'll host a series of discussions about the novel, Johnson's work in general and the fine art of the serial.

So stay tuned. The first review goes live on Monday, with commentary and conversation after that.

David L. Ulin