FICTION:NOBODY MOVE – the title may well be a stage direction for the reader as well as the assorted characters, most of whom are operating on the wrong side of the law. This is a staccato romp, as violent as Tarantino and a great deal funnier than Cormac McCarthy's psychotic ballet, No Country for Old Men(2005).
That said, the Coen Brothers raised a few laughs in their Academy award-winning screen version and admirers of Denis Johnson, of which there are many, myself included, may well be pleased to see their hero having such a good time.
Johnson has written a no- holds-barred blood bath of a narrative that in fairness to him – and the reader – is a screen play in-waiting. The action is fuelled by vicious one-liners. In fact, the dialogue carries the admittedly thin story along at a pace.
Jimmy Luntz, a half-hearted gangster with a history of bad debts has made the big mistake of owing money to Juarez, a guy who gives nasty an entire new range of meaning. But Jimmy’s not all bad – he sings with a choir. As the story begins somewhere in California, Jimmy’s choir is involved in a singing competition: “Jimmy Luntz had never been to war, but this was the sensation, he was sure of that – eighteen guys in a room, Rob, the director, sending them out – eighteen guys shoulder to shoulder, moving out on the orders of their leader to do what they’ve been training day and night to do . . . ”
The choir fails to triumph. But Jimmy’s mood is high; he has a hot tip on a horse: “He felt the itch to make a bet. Felt lucky.”
As if to make it very clear that Jimmy has no grasp of lucky, he walks straight into Gambol, a hood who works for Juarez. Gambol insists that Jimmy come with him. Jimmy can’t get away, but first he has to make a call. “Good deal, I’ll see you Tuesday. Practice is Tuesday, right? Yeah. Tuesday.”
Here we have a petty thief devoted to choir practice. The Coen Brothers have probably already secured the rights. Luntz asks if he can smoke. Gambol replies: “Sure. In your car. But not in my car.”
It’s that kind of story. Luntz and Gambol then engage in screenplay dialogue that quickly sets up the story. Suddenly Gambol announces “My brother just died.” Luntz, who has been trying to persuade Gambol to let him go, thinks to himself “how do you reason with someone who throws something like that into a conversation?”
The next moment Luntz is standing in a phone booth [Remember them?] thinking “that old Colt revolver made a bang that slapped you silly.”
Guess what’s happened? Luntz shot Gambol. Johnson makes use of many screenwriting devices. Never before has his language been quite as cryptic. He is an unusual writer, this novel is often slapstick crude, the humour is earthy and it is visually shocking. An elderly man, admittedly an evil judge confined to a wheelchair, is slapped across the face with his colostomy bag. There is a lot of killing, and even more grotesque are the vicious verbal threats.
Johnson's most recent book, Tree of Smokewon the US National Book Award. It is a remarkable saga, the novel that Norman Mailer would have loved to have written. Vast and sprawling it takes a dark look into the soul of post-Vietnam America.
Even more impressive is The Name of the World(2000). In it, a bereaved college professor is about to lose his job and lives in an apathetic state. It is an unsung masterpiece of a book, Johnson is like that, and shares much in common with Russell Banks and Richard Bausch. When Johnson is good he is very good, when he is coasting and having fun, as he obviously is here, he is still pretty good.
In the middle of all the sordid macho stuff is the lovely Anita, possessed of exotic beauty and a sneering ex-husband intent on destroying her for his own gain. She seeks comfort from the river where she relaxes and takes in some target practice. And oh, yes she drinks like a man.
She is the dream moll, a nice ‘ish’ kind of girl who has been driven beyond mere embezzlement, to murder. She and Luntz begin an unlikely romance. He thinks she sees him as a potential hit man: “I think if you’re looking for a gunslinger, you better keep looking . . . You don’t want a guy with pity in his heart.”
That touch of corn shows how clever Johnson is, ambivalence is always useful.
Just when Juarez is contemplating his next new car, Luntz, thinking “how cool is this guy”. . . “blew his head off.” The next line is classic cinema. “Juarez’s window collapsed into rice grains while a two-inch-wide fissure opened above his ear.”
Meanwhile Anita concludes her killing spree in one of the finest prose sequences in the book “She closed her eyes and directed all awareness into the effort of her right hand. No sight or sound reached her senses. She couldn’t have said which one of them was dying.”
Not the best of Denis Johnson by a long shot. Still, if he is trying to show the screen writers how it’s done, he has made his point.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
