Johnson Does Noir

“When she got to her feet, the knees of her pants were frayed and bits of gravel clung to the fabric, but she didn’t brush them clean or in any other way distract her focus from the figure kneeling on the opposite bank. The dark shape across the water grew elongated, also standing. They faced one another with the Feather River in between. In two or three more hours? they would kneel again and drink.”

Among prose stylists, Denis Johnson has few living equals. His finest moments bristle with beauty and potential; words blossom inward toward the enigmatic center of the story, disclosing possibility rather than meaning. Sentences line the pages like bombs waiting to detonate. Johnson’s economy is the economy of Hemingway, if Hemingway was sleepwalking or under hypnosis. The passage above, from Johnson’s latest novel, “Nobody Move,” glimpses these heights. It’s the only one.

In 2007, Johnson received the National Book Award for his six hundred-page Vietnam War epic, “Tree of Smoke.” Last year, he serialized “Nobody Move,” a self-proclaimed “noir novel,” in four parts—each corresponding to about 50 widely spaced pages—in “Playboy” magazine. At passing glance, the novel has all the trappings of a small joke told at the expense of a literary world that rushed to canonize Johnson in the wake of “Tree of Smoke.” A closer look, however, raises the question of whether the author had humor or self-sabotage on his mind. “Nobody Move” is the gravitational inverse to a novel like “Tree of Smoke”: a breezy, barely-there venture into the heyday of pulp fiction. The concept actually has a good deal of promise behind it—“Jesus’ Son,” Johnson’s 1992 collection of short stories that is arguably his masterpiece, dwells on the short, ugly lives of a noir-esque cast of junkies and thugs in an abortive urban purgatory. But this book isn’t a novelization of “Jesus’ Son.” “Nobody Move” is—anticlimactically—a mild pulp pastiche that doesn’t even seem to rise to its own expectations.

The plot is appropriately simple: Jimmy Luntz is a barbershop singer with a gambling addiction and an outstanding debt to a small-time loan shark. The supply of clichés at work throughout the novel’s first pages practically spell out the remainder of the story—a sultry, femme fatale of a love interest; a cross-country chase; a stoic, streetwise henchman looking to collect Luntz’s head; a shootout. That’s what readers get—and that’s all.

As homage, “Nobody Move” never rises beyond pale imitation. It’s clear that Johnson knows the tropes by heart. The problem is that everyone else does too. The pleasure of homage, especially with a genre like noir, is in the author’s personal touches. Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men” comes immediately to mind—move the action to Texas, ramp up the violence; nothing more complicated than that. But other than the aforementioned passage, and a frankness about various bodily functions, Johnson’s stylistic fingerprints are conspicuously absent from the novel.

But “Nobody Move” doesn’t work as a parody either. Johnson never mocks or inflates the stock traits of noir or pulp any more than they would ordinarily mock and inflate themselves. If anything, the one implicit joke is on the author; there is only the awkwardness of a character self-consciously using a cell phone over a pay phone, or complaining about the steep minority of smokers in American society. Readers don’t laugh at Johnson’s noir-by-the-numbers. They laugh at the absurdity of a noir parody being published in 2009. And even laughing is a stretch.

Could Johnson possibly be serious? Was the “Playboy” serialization meant to invoke the memory of past contributors such as Bradbury or Nabokov? Was Johnson pressured to publish a stand-alone edition? It’s not for us to infer, and it doesn’t seem likely, but for all its timidity, “Nobody Move” is best read as any other story. Sympathy falls typically, but genuinely, in favor of Luntz, especially when, in the face of almost certain castration, he tells a story about accepting a lottery ticket over a sizable amount of money as payment for childhood chores. Gambol, the debt-collector, for all his aloofness and savagery (he intends to eat the testicles in question), isn’t beyond love either; his relationship with the retired female Army medic is a charming—if lewd—extension of his story. As antiquated a genre as it might be, the sheer number of noir elements employed is enough to pull even the most fickle reader through the slim volume. The novel’s success isn’t one shining moment of stylistic joy—the aforementioned passage may even be out of place in “Nobody Move.” It’s that when the $2.3 million dollars that kicks around between the characters (you already knew there was some sum, even if you hadn’t been told) goes to the bad guys, the protagonists—and the reader—don’t really care. Subverting a genre obsessed with materialism isn’t exactly difficult, and Johnson doesn’t leave much to work with—but he’s no sadist.

—Staff writer Ryan J. Meehan can be reached at rmeehan@fas.harvard.edu.