Criticism: Luckies From Now On (Denis Johnson’s Nobody Move Shifts Narrative Modes for Want of Salvation)

By Thomas Johnson

 

“NOT EVERY DAY COMES OUT SYMMETRICAL, BABYLOVE.”

            Denis Johnson serialized his eighth novel, Nobody Move, on deadline and in seeming opposition to every impulse that preceded it, presented nearly entirely in dialogue and without any backstory. Published in four parts by Playboy in 2008 and appearing with the slimmest prose from the minimal master, Nobody Move shows the clearest shift in redemption and grace in the author’s narrative focus, asking readers to consider what it means to find salvation here on earth.

            Johnson never averred to a true dogmatic principle of any kind, but managed to compose a wide corpus of work that examines where characters receive their salvation even as they meet their ends. His canon is filled with the kinds of souls and citizens, powerless against to their own vices on earth, that could only be redeemed by a spiritual savior. It represents, in Johnson’s words, “…a fascination of some kind, a religious impulse. Basically our culture does not have a religion… So, to some extent, there's a lot of vitality in a religion where spirituality feeds itself, is reflective or is called everything by everything, rather than just the church.”[1] But where the author might have found religious mythologies inherent to and within cultural and historical shifts (as written into his second novel, Fiskadoro, which allegorizes the Christ in a post-apocalyptic future), Johnson spent the back half of his career removing nightmares, dreams, and prayer from his novels, and instead replacing them with earthen motifs of water, dirt, and acceleration, the very things we touch, see, and smell as we move about in our only guaranteed existence.

            Almost as if cuddling up to the Buddhist principle, Johnson’s embrace of realist fiction in Nobody Move seeks to remind his audience that the lived experience might be the only salvation we ever get, but also the only salvation we ever need: “I figure it's a Jungian idea: where is spirituality? It's going to be expressed one way or the other. If we're going to fashion a concern for everything, we need a spirituality.”[2]

            To ground this ideology, Johnson wraps the entire narrative along and around the presence of the Feather River, the object of Luntz’s escape and the reminder that a cleansing is always nearby if only we can find it. Our spirituality, Johnson is saying, is the earth entire.

 

“GIVE ME A CHANCE, FRIEND. A CHANCE TO WORK MY MAGIC.”

            If we think of salvation and grace as the possibility for everlasting life in some great hereafter, we can picture a comforting place to make our final rest. The object becomes not so much avoiding that last breath, but simply correcting our posture before lying down, a needle pointing in the right direction when it comes to the end. These are the impulses of religiosity in recognition of mortality and they form the early narrative modes of Johnson working from Angels (1983) to The Name of the World (2000). Johnson’s chief proponents for this reach for life are characters suffering their own fallibility, characters like Jamie Mays and Michael Reed who maneuver through addiction in order to escape their greater and more existential issues of loss, guilt, and loneliness. Johnson’s meditation on weakness provides the broader context that we, all of us, deserve to be saved, by leaving out the central inciting moment of trauma, instead forcing readers to merely consider the effects and consequences:

“Today there is a general tendency to redefine experience, individual and historical, in terms of trauma: a lingua trauma is spoken in popular culture, academic discourse, and art and literary worlds. Many contemporary novelists (e.g., Paul Auster, Dennis Cooper, Denis Johnson, Steve Erickson, Ian McEwan, Tim O’Brien) and filmmakers (e.g., Atom Egoyan in Exotica, Terry Gilliam in 12 Monkeys, the Monty Python version of La Jetee) conceive experience in this paradoxical modality; experience that is not experienced, at least not punctually, that comes too early or too late, that must be acted out compulsively or reconstructed after the fact, almost analytically. Often in these novels and films narrative runs in reverse or moves very erratically, and the peripeteia is an event that happened long ago or not at all (per the logic of trauma this is sometimes ambiguous).”[3]

By ignoring those inciting events, Johnson centers his readers within his character’s psyches at the moment of crisis, where we’re all audibly asking for just a little bit of help, for once, maybe for all.

            Jimmy Luntz, in actual image of that crying prayer for help, opens Nobody Move belting out barbershop tunes, something that brings him to very threshold of crossing over: “Jimmy Luntz had never been to war, but this was the sensation, he was sure of that.”[4] Luntz is able-bodied and without a worry in his head. It’s there, singing in competition, where Nobody Move opens in media res and clips by at the speed of a car chase. This time, though, Johnson eschews jumping around in time to unfold the details for the reader and instead moves straight ahead, never once looking back.

            Without that expository information or even so much as an anecdote passed from one character to the next, Nobody Move remains firmly in the present. This is a strong shift in the author’s narrational focus, absolving the acknowledgement of past crimes that might deserve punishment and replacing them with the capacity for creating a new divine path forward, all by yourself.

            In this context, Jimmy Luntz goes from singing in a choir to making a life-or-death escape when Ernest “Gambol” Gambolini comes to collect an overdue gambling debt. Luntz doesn’t have the funds and asks for one chance to “make his magic.” Gambol, holding the gun, says time is out. But Johnson gives Luntz that chance and by the end of that first chapter we see Luntz standing over Gambol instructing him to make a tourniquet for his leg. Luntz just had to take matters into his own hands.

 

“ALL I NEED IS HALF A TANK OF GAS TO GET TO THE NEXT MAN.”

            Where Luntz goes next splits the narrative strategy once more, leaving Nobody Move as a novel without a destination, distinct among Johnson’s work. In returning to various locations in his work, Johnson “discovers that particular regions have significance for him, and not just for [his characters] but for others who, like him, return even when they do not know or cannot remember why.”[5]

            Johnson previously moved his characters in a search for home that mirrored the Islamic Hajj to Mecca, the Judaic pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Catholic pilgrimage to the Vatican City, or the Buddhist pilgrimage to Varanasi. If the idea is that an individual can achieve salvation in this life, and that those choices must include movement closer to holy ground, Johnson’s shift in the capacity for redemption creates a new pattern in narrative mode suggesting that redemption is ours to take, by any means necessary.

            Because for the rest of Nobody Move, we watch Jimmy Luntz drive off and plan his escape away from the consequences of his crimes. Just like the perepeteiac event, Johnson presents a story that comes loaded within the reader’s rolodex – this is a noir novel, a chase to escape a bad debt, Luntz is a degenerate gambler, Gambol works for the kingpin. We know these things inherently and so Johnson avoids them entirely, leaving this short work to move only in the present mode, firmly grounded in realist presentation.

            Johnson’s shift in focus then straddles Wolfgang Iser’s interpretive analysis of the schematized aspects of a text, where Johnson alone produces the subject matter but the act of concretization lies within the reader. By keeping the text free of jumps in time and rooting the narrative distance firmly in the present mode, Johnson situates himself somewhere between the artistic and aesthetic polarities of the text: “It must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or to the subjectivity of the reader, and it is from this virtuality that it derives its dynamism. As the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text and relates the different views and patterns to one another he sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too.”[6] This act of gainful involvement on behalf of the author might on the one hand represent the complete acknowledgment of genre, moving as it does in the dark corners of crime and subject matter, replete of context, history, and future. But it is, equally and crucially, a descension from previous authorial nods: by eliminating the notion of some other, offward salvation waiting to receive Johnson’s characters, and therefore the reader also, there remains only the here and the now which require active participation on behalf of the characters, and therefore again the readers, if they want to save themselves.

            This is less a tacit maneuver on behalf of the author and more a critical juncture in the capacities we possess for our salvation in the 21^st Century.

 

“WHAT CENTURY ARE YOU IN, GUY?”

            Johnson builds within this logic of personal redemption a shift from death to life, that death is not merely some step to the next but rather might be the final step itself, and therefore worth avoiding if only to breathe a little more of the air that surrounds us. Luntz spends the remainder of Nobody Move in hiding and just out of reach of Gambol and his boss, Juarez, until finally being captured and bringing the climax to part. But the author avoids moving Luntz through the motivations of ghosts (Resuscitation of a Hanged Man), myths (Fiskadoro), or tremors (Angels), and leaves Luntz’s truest desires for the reader to conceptualize. The obvious answer for the reader is: no one wants to die.

            What this contextualizes therein is the central question: what is it that moves human beings to survival? What is that ineffable thing? Johnson never attempts to provoke or provide an answer. I could argue this as a mode of the narrative shift alone into the realist mode, but an acknowledgement must be made for Johnson’s National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke, published two years prior in 2007 and ending with a speech to the crowd asking, begging, praying over people that “worshipped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved.”[7] This conscious choice elicits a turn by the author away from the final statement of salvation (“all will be saved”) in spite of their sins (“turned their backs on their true beliefs”) and gives autonomy to those same wayward souls to correct their course in this living world.

            Johnson asks us to believe in the possibility that people can redeem their lives here and now. If Jimmy Luntz was a derelict gambler, he becomes a redemptive man through his efforts to aid his accomplice Anita Desilvera in finding justice against her ex-husband. If Anita Desilvera was a drunken victim of abuse and blackmail, she becomes a redemptive woman through her ability to properly judge and mete out the differences inherent in good and evil that all men possess, correctly choosing, even in her stuporific and belligerent state of drunkenness, to align herself with the good guys.

            It’s through these transactions that Johnson gives, for the first time, a quality of change and improvement to his characters, that they might not just amble through a swift blindness toward some hopeful holy destination, but rather make the necessary transformation in their lives to exist at peace (and in one piece) while still on two feet and on the right side of the grass.

            Near the end, Johnson gets as close as he ever will in Nobody Move to manifesting the mythical. Anita has gone two days without alcohol and, having returned from murdering her ex-husband, stops along the Feather River to drink from its waters. On the other end, a figure appears and mirrors her every move, a ghost in the murkiness of her delirium tremens. For the reader who knows what withdrawals are, the terror is present and real, but without direct mention of the ghost in Anita’s mind, there exists slightly the possibility for a fissure in the reality of a fantastic possibility. Here, too, though Nobody Move sits apart from its predecessors, as the ghost appears in the present moment, a real and living spectre: “They faced one another with the Feather River in between. In two or three more hours they would kneel again and drink.”[8]

            It is not the mythos of the past that ruptures into our decision making, but very present appearing before our eyes. The allegory is tied when Anita drinks from the water, the source of all life.

 

“IT’S COLD, BUT IT WON’T KILL YOU.”

            Eventually, Jimmy Luntz powers his way out of death’s grip. He’s scarred and beaten, but his enemies are defeated and the road ahead is wide open. He stares at his own image, dogged and bloody walking down the highway, in awe of his presence and capabilities. The violence available within, possessed of the will to live. Notice that in this moment as Luntz walks into the nearest convenience store, Johnson focuses on the touch of life held in our senses:

            “As he touched the ticket, he could feel it in his fingers. He set his money clip on the counter and flattened it with the heel of his hand and slipped the ticket into it along with nothing but his driver’s license.

            Two bucks in his grip. He bought two tix. Scratched a loser, and the second one hit for ten. ‘There we go. See that?’

            ‘You want it in tickets?’

            ‘Just a pack of Camel straights. No. You got Luckies? It’s Luckies from now on.”[9]

Luck is for the living, Johnson reminds us. To cross that artistic line and hand something over to the reader on the aesthetic side, where we contextualize our meaning, Johnson wants us to know that life is hard but still worth living:

                        “Where’s the river?”

                        “Right over there a half a mile.”

                        “Is it cold?’

                        “It’s cold. But it won’t kill you.”[10]

            The very teleological notion of peace somewhere creates the possibility of peace here as well, in spite of all the goings-on in a world of corruption and sadness, a world of collapsed possibilities and unimagined futures where each horrific event, one after the next, is transmitted to an audience in real time to unmask the hyperreality of truth qua truth - this is it, folks.

            And so with Nobody Move, Denis Johnson brings that haunting search for salvation down to this earthen minute. Johnson’s shift in narrative mode from an erratic time replete with mythical and mystical possibilities toward a realist mode of scientific precision and limited reality is the inversion of our own attempted escape from a world constantly at war. Johnson simply looked this gnarly existence squarely in its eye and wrote it for what it is: “It’s cold, but it won’t kill you.”

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press, Oxford, 2004.

Connors, Philip. “Denis Johnson’s Higher Power.” The Virginia Quarterly Review, WINTER 2008, Vol. 84, No. 1 (WINTER 2008), pp.251-257.

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. Routledge Classics, New York, 1993.

Elshtain, Eric. “A Conversation with Denis Johnson.” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, 1993, No. 18/19 (1993), pp. 105-114.

Foster, Hal. “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic.” October, Autumn, 1996, Vol. 78 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 106-124.

Johnson, Denis. Angels. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1983.

Johnson, Denis. Fiskadoro. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1985.

Johnson, Denis. Tree of Smoke. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2007.

Johnson, Denis. Nobody Move. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2009.

Johnson, Denis. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Random House, New York, 2018.

Su, John T. “Haunted by Place: Moral Obligation and the Postmodern Novel.” The Centennial Review, Fall 1998, Vol. 42, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: Locations of Culture: Identity, Home, Theory (Fall 1998), pp. 589-614.

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[1] Elshtain, Eric. “A Conversation with Denis Johnson.” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, 1993, No. 18/19 (1993), pp. 105-114.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Foster, Hal. “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic.” October, Autumn, 1996, Vol. 78 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 106-124.

[4] Johnson, Denis. Nobody Move. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2009, pp. 3.

[5] Su, John T. “Haunted by Place: Moral Obligation and the Postmodern Novel.” The Centennial Review, Fall 1998, Vol. 42, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: Locations of Culture: Identity, Home, Theory (Fall 1998), pp. 123.

[6] Iser, Wolfgag. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, 1978 [1981], pp. 21.

[7] Johnson, Denis. Tree of Smoke. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2007.

[8] Johnson, Denis. Nobody Move. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2009. pp.130

[9] Johnson, Denis. Nobody Move. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2009. pp.195.

[10] ibid. pp. 196.

Thomas Johnson lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and writes in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at The New School, New York, New York. He is founder and editor-in-chief of Union Spring Literary Review and works as Reviews Editor for West Trade Review. He received a Master of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Johnson first graduated from the University of Texas at Austin before enlisting in the United States Army. His work is in Museum of Americana Literary Review, Cleaver Magazine, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and West Trade Review.