Basso Profundo: Denis Johnson

Early on in Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move,” hero Jimmy Luntz hears the tiny snatch of a reggae song: “Nobody move/Nobody gets hurt.” Unfortunately the desperate and outcast denizens of this novella move around plenty.

Denis Johnson, National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prized finalist for the august and delicious “Tree of Smoke,” turns his acknowledged talents to the crime caper here. Well, it’s not a crime caper so much as an adventure story about a gambler who hooks up with a beautiful woman, desperate herself, and tries without much success to stay ahead of the criminals who want to kill him.

The chief delight here is the dialog. It’s frank, laconic, and honest – there isn’t a wasted syllable anywhere. Picking out one conversation that one hopes is indicative of a whole story’s is quite risky, but I’m going to risk it anyway. Jimmy tells his temporary-but-beautiful partner Anita that a new outfit she’s trying on in J.C. Penney’s looks fine on her:

“It fits.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, and she sort of meant it. But not as a compliment. “You’re homeless, right?” [she asked.]
“I have a home. I’m just not going back there, is all.”
“So right there in that shopping bag is everything you own?”
“Everything I need.”
“And your white canvas bag – what’s in that one?”
“Everything else I need.”
“I know what’s in it. A sawed-off shotgun.”
He seemed completely unsurprised. “It’s not a sawed-off, it’s a pistol-grip. And it isn’t mine.”
“I peeked in the bag while you were in the shower.”
“You zipped it up real nice,” he said. “Good for you.”

Events take place in the blond blankness of minor Northern California valley towns, and feature its open fields and forested riversides: folks creep around on the lam and plot escape, revenge, or betrayal. Folks get caught, turn the tables, get shot, and angle for the big payday. Through it all, gambler Jimmy Luntz keeps trying to force his luck, and succeeds for a time. Go down gambling, his actions speak loud and clear, and you may not have to go at all.

I’m cheered and smiling at this mantissa of a story. Even with my challenging schedule, I read it in two sittings, nearly unheard-of for me. Yes, it’s slim, but it’s one of those things you don’t want to stop doing until it’s done, and then you just want to start all over again, like a looping out-of-control water slide. It’s wonderful, it shows Johnson’s force and skill to terrific effect, and well worth your while.

Perhaps the ultimate novelistic treatment of the origins of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, "Tree of Smoke" is an epic, a quick read, and really centers around the power of lies. This is gigantic, heroic stuff.

The narrative focuses on a young CIA officer assigned to Vietnam in 1961, Skip Sands. Skip is the nephew of the near-mythic, and definitely delusional Frank Sands, a colonel in (presumably) military intelligence, and one major driving force behind American intervention. Other characters also bob and eddy in Frank's wake, in particular a sergeant named Jimmy Storm. His real name, it turns out is B.S., and in this B.S. Storm, we have a distillation of one of the main thrusts of this novel.

Skip butts heads with B.S. on his way to ultimate disillusionment. At the end, besides being a man wanted by the authorities, Skip feels he must assert the truth of Frank's demise, against all those who want to believe he's alive.

I have to congratulate Denis Johnson on the effort throughout, but there is one episode that seals this novel's greatness for me. B.S. forces a shady local man to help him determine some piece of intelligence or other - this is very late in the game, after the Colonel is dead (I think - it's been well over a year since I read this). In the course of guiding Sgt. B.S. Storm to this remote location, the man and the sergeant have to go through a maze-like cave system. They get briefly lost, and thoroughly covered in bat guano. Ultimately, they both fall from a hole six or eight feet to the ground, emerging from the cave into the light, having been "shat" to the ground. I thought this was a sort of summation, a highly appropriate treatment for our master BS-er.

This is masterful, vivid, and powerful. The very distinctive language of the American soldier in Vietnam - part battlefield stress, part drug addlement, part military slang, and all insubordination - is wonderfully, distractingly, on display here. I shake my head in wonder. This is one to definitely take up. Most definitely.