Denis Johnson's 'Nobody Move': brutally noir

Since June, Jacket Copy has been hosting an ongoing conversation about Denis Johnson's noir serial "Nobody Move," which is being published in four parts in Playboy magazine. Part 3 has just hit the stands; Tod Goldberg adds his thoughts.

First, I have to agree with David: This is the best installment of the series. I feel Johnson hitting his stride here — he's set his characters into motion in the previous sections, set up the action, and now here, he's dealing with the tangible consequences, and it really clips along. The dialogue is sharp, the scenes are all moving toward conflict and away from banter, and you can really see that things are going to fall apart and fall apart in magnificent fashion. Plus, any time someone gets hit in the head with a shovel after digging his lovers' grave, well, color me smitten. There are twists and turns and ramifications in this section that don't end up in murder — well, apart from the demise of Capra — but which is no less brutal. What I also like is that when people get hurt in this story, they stay hurt. No one is superhuman; they continue to suffer their physical pain.

As for Carolyn's question, I don't think there are rules per se. I mean, certainly, there's often a woman involved, and money, and pride, and stupidity, but I think that's true for most novels and stories. I went out the other night with a friend who is a DA in Los Angeles, prosecuting gang murders and the like, and I asked him whether he thought the people killing one another on the streets were evil or stupid, and he said he generally thought they were stupid, that they didn't interpret the world outside the three miles around their neighborhood, didn't realize that in other places, other settings, you didn’t shoot your best friend in the face over a dice game, thought that if you took these guys out of their world and put them somewhere else that they'd adapt and change and learn the new rules of life, because they'd want to be respected in that world, too, and respect in that world means something different.

I think, in a way, it's a similar thing: You write a noir story and you're placing people in a particular setting where certain behavior is expected of the people. In "Nobody Move," in a world filled with criminals, we expect certain things to happen: sudden violence often followed by sudden sex and a healthy dose of the absurd. Why the absurd? Because if you dealt with things too directly, too clinically, it would be impossible to feel empathy toward the characters. You might feel sympathy, which I think makes the reader pity a character, but the absurd allows for us to look at the particular situation and laugh a little. But if this were your life, or the life of your friend or someone you loved, this would be the most horrific story ever, the worst experience of an entire life, but rendered as noir, it's stylized in such a way that we can laugh at it a bit. So maybe that's the one rule Johnson adheres to: He allows us to disassociate from reality and shows us bad people doing bad things to worse people. And here, in this installment, he does it better than most.

— Tod Goldberg

Photo by tanakawho via Flickr

Denis Johnson's 'Nobody Move': notes on noir

Reviewing a batch of DVDs in the New York Times, Dave Kehr wrote: "Film noir is a notoriously difficult concept to define." I don’t buy that. In a narrow way, noir is the film style that emerged when German expressionism met the American hardboiled idiom through the agency of the émigré writers and directors who fled Europe and flocked to Hollywood throughout the 1930s.

The genre, in this classic sense, probably begins with Billy Wilder’s "Double Indemnity" and was given its full stop in the 1950s by Robert Aldrich’s "Kiss Me Deadly" and "A Touch of Evil" by Orson Welles. That's the broad stroke of the history. Check out Paul Schrader’s essay “Notes on Film Noir” — he nailed it.

The genre reflected post-WW2 American unease about sex, politics, identity, the future and was characterized, as Carolyn says, by pronounced black and white chiaroscuro, exaggerated camera angles and shadows. Noir has a broader thematic meaning, too, however, and this is what David is getting at.

Noirs are stories that operate like traps, in which characters come to sense, and even rush toward, their own destruction. Pushing it, we might say that “Oedipus Rex” is the first noir; noir tweaks a fear of fate that’s haunted humanity forever.

Where Denis Johnson fits in, after the jump.

Denis Johnson & the expectations of noir

Since June, Jacket Copy has been hosting an ongoing conversation about Denis Johnson's noir serial "Nobody Move," which is being published in four parts in Playboy magazine. Part 3 has just hit the stands, and once again, we pick up where we left off.

Although the movie "L.A. Confidential" was entirely noir in subject and time period, it upset expectations for noir, particularly in how it looked. Compare the high-contrast black and white of Veronica Lake's publicity still with the soft golds and blues of Kim Basinger as a Veronica Lake look-alike in "L.A. Confidential." Traditional noir films filled much of the screen with blackness (hence "noir"), but "L.A. Confidential" dragged its seedy doings out into daylight, in full, saturated color. The film honored and reenergized the noir genre by subverting one of its essential elements — its darkness.

David Ulin writes about Denis Johnson's noir "Nobody Move":

we can also see where this is going, see how all the various plot lines will converge as the novel narrows to its inexorable end.

That, too, is one of the pleasures of noir, the way it is a fiction not so much of choices but of the lack of choices, in which the challenge for a writer is to gradually close down possibilities and channel everything into a single narrative chute.

I'd like to think that the rules of genre can be bent and retooled, as they were in "L.A. Confidential."  If there once was a dictate to shrink characters' choices, is it still the rule? I wonder where it comes from: Tradition? Readers' expectations? Is there a Noir Writers' Playbook? Are there Noir Police — or, more likely, Noir Thugs — deployed to keep writers in line?

But I don't have to just wonder. I can ask. Richard Rayner, Susan Straight and Tod Goldberg have all written noir. So, what are the rules? Can any be ignored? Does beginning a novel or story as noir mean that you must narrow it to an inexorable end?

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credits: Veronica Lake / Associated Press; Kim Basinger in "L.A. Confidential" / Warner Bros. Inc.

Denis Johnson's 'Nobody Move': Where do we go from here?

Since June, Jacket Copy has been hosting an ongoing conversation about Denis Johnson's noir serial "Nobody Move," which is being published in four parts in Playboy. Part 3 has just hit the stands, and once again, we pick up where we left off.

Let's start with some hyperbole: The third installment of "Nobody Move" is the best yet. The action moves like a steamroller, and the dialogue, which I liked in Part 2 but Tod Goldberg thought was overdone, has been pared back to a minimum, a way to highlight the tension rather than drive the plot. Again, I don't want to give too much away, but Johnson kicks the narrative into high gear, moving us out of set-up mode and into the meat. In fact, reading the third installment, I feel for the first time that we're in the heart of the heart of the story, that things are driving finally, that we're on our way to some kind of inexorable end.

What Johnson does so well here is to reintegrate his two parallel plot lines -- the one involving Jimmy Luntz and the other about Harry Gambol -- while starting to suggest how the whole project will resolve. Jimmy and Harry have been apart, you may remember, since the very beginning of "Nobody Move," when Jimmy shot Harry and left him by the side of the road. Harry's been recuperating ever since, but now he's back, strong and silent -- a great white shark of a man, ignoring Mary, the nurse who has become his lover, when she warns him to be careful with his injured leg, that his sutures haven't completely healed.

With Gambol out in the world, Jimmy's life immediately becomes more dangerous -- desperate even. "Luntz pushed it hard," Johnson writes toward the end of the installment, "making sure he heard the tires on every curve. If a cop lit him up, he'd steer it off a cliff."

Now we're in the real stuff, where noir becomes existential, where all the choices are bad ones and "[t]here's no way to go," as Jimmy tells Anita, "but the way we're going. I know how it ends, but there's no other way."

Where it's going after the jump.

Denis Johnson's 'Nobody Move': Third time's the charm

The third part of Denis Johnson's serial novel "Nobody Move" is out in the September Playboy, and starting next Tuesday, we'll be back on the case, with Richard Rayner, Carolyn Kellogg, Tod Goldberg, Susan Straight and I weighing in on this newest installment, as well as the project as a whole.

What's the latest with Anita and Jimmy? Will Gambol ever get his revenge?

Stay tuned. We'll let you know. ...

— David L. Ulin

Photo by Chor Ip via Flickr

Denis Johnson's characters hook up

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

In "Nobody Move," Denis Johnson makes sure that his leads, Anita and Jimmy, hook up. When we left them at the end of Part 1, they were heading toward bed:

"When was a guy like you ever lucky?"
He pulled her blouse over her head and a couple of buttons popped loose and flew at his face…. “Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? I’m lucky now."

Cut to Part 2: Jimmy wakes up and looks at Anita’s body between the sheets; whatever happened between them goes unwritten. Soon they get up, encounter authorities, embark on their road trip and wind up together again in a seedy room above a bar. Anita’s aphrodisiac is booze, and when Jimmy finally gets her in the mood...

The TV emitted a small steady roar. In the show a man clung to the side of a speeding train. Luntz let the TV run so he could see her by its light. All through their lovemaking Anita kept quiet, but she looked right at him....

And then there’s a break. Right when Denis Johnson gets to the sex, his details get rather vague. Has the author of "Jesus' Son" gone prim?

That's after the jump.

Denis Johnson's 'Nobody Move' ... and story neatniks

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

This point that Susan and Carolyn make about plot holes and ellipses is really interesting.

In one of my novels, a thriller set in the 1950s called "The Devil’s Wind," at one point the heroine is presumed to have committed suicide, apparently drowning herself in Lake Mead. Later she shows up and starts offing the bad dudes. The bloated and disfigured body that had, indeed, been found in Lake Mead wasn’t hers, but somebody else’s. Which was as much explanation as I wanted to give. I didn’t bother putting in sentences about lots of people having killed themselves in Lake Mead and still doing so, blah-blah, and this case of mistaken identity being perfectly reasonable, especially back then, blah-blah-blah. Anyway, my editor in New York, a very demanding guy and a big thriller honcho, accepted what I’d done without a blink. Likewise the publishers in Germany and Spain. But this plot-point drove the French and Dutch editors crazy. I got polite e-mails from Paris and Amsterdam, asking, "Well, whose was that body in the lake?," then not-quite-so-polite ones suggesting I tie up this loose end in the story quilt, or they wouldn’t publish. So I did, and the current discussion about Denis Johnson and his story blips got me wondering why some very attentive readers didn’t register or worry about my carelessness (and it was that, to some extent, I just thought, "Come on, you don’t really want me to explain that, do you?") while others — well, it just bugged the heck out of them.

Partly it’s just a question of simple human difference. Story neatniks want everything tied in a bow. Others don’t bother with what Jonathan Demme calls "fridge-door questions," the thing that happens when you get home after a movie, want a snack, open the fridge door and suddenly find yourself thinking: "Hey, Bourne had the briefcase when he crashed the car, then we saw him getting out of the car without the briefcase, but it was in his hand in the next scene. What was that about?" But there is, too, the question of the attitude and expectation we bring to genre.

expectation and attitude after the jump.

Hell of a ride

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

I think what Carolyn says about implausibility is absolutely right, and the point she makes about Chandler and noir working with those kinds of ellipses in fact or logic is true.  Last summer I reread a lot of Ross MacDonald, and this summer I'm reading my fifth Raymond Chandler, so I've been thinking about why those noir novels did such a great job of keeping the reader intensely interested, so much so that who cared about minor details?

I believe what a lot of literary novelists lose sight of, with their love of language, is plot, and this excerpt, as David says, is loaded with plot -- it's the classic noir road trip.  (I did think exactly the same thing about the duffel bag, though.)  Once these characters are on the road, everything sings.  The descriptions of the landscape are great, again. I love the way Anita gets mad about buying JC Penney clothes.   

But what about the dialogue? It's after the jump.

A literary palate cleanser?

Tod makes an interesting point about the way our experiences of Johnson's work color our expectations of "Nobody Move." I, too, am a huge admirer of Johnson, especially "Angels," "Jesus' Son" and the wildly underrated "Already Dead" — all of which are, as Tod points out, monumental because of how they get at the interior, explicating not just action but their characters' inner lives.

I agree that this is not part of "Nobody Move" — not yet anyway. But that's OK, and here's why. I did read "Tree of Smoke," and I was disappointed. The reason? The same one Tod cites in regard to "Nobody Move," that I was "aware of the writing for the first time in a book by Johnson; that I can see the machinery at play." I'd never had that experience, and it made me approach "Nobody Move" with trepidation, which, I'm glad to say, the story has not borne out.

But ... is this anything more than Johnson lite? Find out after the jump.

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)

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.

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.

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 serial novel: Slumming it?

On this question of suspense: I once did a novel of 175,000 words and felt pretty pleased with myself, stamina-wise, until I went back to "Bleak House" and realized that Dickens had written closer to a million, building a huge cathedral of a novel in a way that, according to his biographers Peter Ackroyd and Edgar Johnson, was only semi-planned.

It really blows your mind.  Dickens set up and juggled multiple storylines to sustain suspense over such length. Carolyn rightly made the point that he was in the habit of introducing new characters almost out of the blue to keep things going. He just heaved them in and tossed them into the story blaze, especially in the early novels, the baggy monsters "Pickwick Papers" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." At that stage in his career, he was all about entertainment and excitement, whether of language or incident, about making it happen on the page, and giving his audience the same sort of instant bang that we, as viewers, as readers, increasingly demand these days, as David said a couple of days ago.

I don't get the feeling that Johnson is slumming it here, just being aware of his audience, as Dickens needed to be. The reader of Playboy just doesn't have the same commitment to Denis Johnson as does the purchaser of Denis Johnson novels. Johnson is too much the pro to be doing this off the cuff. I'd guess that he's got this plotted out reasonably carefully, with all the big cliffhangers already in mind. At the same time, he's enough of a purist to let the spontaneous moments occur -- like the guy's hat floating away on the wind. The next chunk will be the tricky one, though, and we'll start to get the sense of how good this thing might be.

Richard Rayner   

Photo credit: Dickens' desk and chair, Associated Press/Christie's

The lost art of seduction

David's take on the immediacy of contemporary culture made me realize that I may have become addicted to instant narrative gratification. I love the magazine One Story because it's just one story, to be read and finished, neat and quick. On the Internet, don't ask me to click through 10 pages of self-absorbed prose — if it doesn't grab me early on, see ya, I'm out.

Getting just Part 1 (of four) of "Nobody Move" is a tease. We DO have to wait a whole month before we get the next piece. We DO have to save space in our spilling-over brainpans for Denis Johnson's characters and plot twists. It's unfair. It's painful. It's frustrating.

And then I realize: It's seduction.

When I hunted down my copy of Johnson's "Tree of Smoke," it was there in all its hefty glory, an elaborate, enormous work, and if I could just keep my eyes open and brain sharp long enough, I could consume it all in one sitting. Now I see there is something of a marvelous torture in the delayed gratification of a serial. I can't possibly get it all at once, and that brings on a craving that's missing when I can just turn the page to get to the next chapter.

Finally, this puts the setting in some perspective for me. Like Susan, I've been a bit squeamish about having to read this in Playboy. But of all the nudie magazines, an exasperated male friend pointed out, Playboy is the least smutty. It doesn't run fetish or hard-core porn photos. Instead, it's full of mostly naked women and totally naked women smiling willingly for the camera. It's the tease of porn mags. Instead of raunch, Playboy is, in its own way, about seduction. Which is why a serial there is starting to make sense.

Carolyn Kellogg

photo by extranoise in Germany via Flickr

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

The serial novel as highwire act

I think Carolyn’s point about tension is a key one — especially given the immediacy of contemporary culture, where we’re used to stories being wrapped up in 22 or 48 minutes, and a serial can unfold almost in real time on the Web. Here, we’re looking at a 19th century lag time, a month between installments, which begs the question of how to keep a reader’s mind engaged. Often, I can’t remember what I did last week, let alone a month ago, and I wonder whether, when the second installment of “Nobody Move” comes out in mid-July, I’ll have to go back and re-read this installment just to get back up to speed.

I suspect I will, which raises another set of issues, since the story Johnson seems intent to tell may not bear up under repeated re-readings. How does an author maintain tension across the real time divide of monthly installments? What does that mean for the narrative?

On a related front, I also wonder — as per Richard’s comments about the set-up — just how far in advance Johnson has things planned. From a reader’s perspective, 10,000 words a month is a snail’s pace, but for a writer (especially a writer as complex and intentional as Johnson), it’s a power sprint. Does he know what’s coming? Is he throwing things into the story just to provide himself with challenges? How will the narrative change from month to month?

Thinking about this, you really begin to appreciate the achievement of a writer like Dickens, who unfolded his novels over a year and a half. For me, this is part of the draw of such a project — the sheer tightrope walking nature of it — but I’m very curious about how it functions from the writer’s perspective, how uncertainty (and deadline pressure) seeds the work.

David L. Ulin

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