I've picked up and finished Denis Johnson's new novel Nobody Move. It is a speedy read, full of Johnson's terse dialogue and tense scenes. A master having fun with the crime-novel genre, Johnson seems to be channeling the same type of dialogue that made Jesus' Son so extraordinary, but here the mood is different, almost like he's not taking the story seriously. This is no great crime, of course, because the story is straight pulp--sugary-sweet pulp, easy going down and enjoyable. It may not stay a part of you like Tree of Smoke and Jesus' Son do, but it does have Johnson's gripping prose, his trademark that snatches you from out of a free-fall. In the end, with each tiny section of Nobody Move passing by, you say to yourself, how the hell does he do that?
Denis Johnson is one of the authors in my trinity of influence...I'm not sure if these three guys are my favorites, but rather I think I'm directly influenced by the various ways they tell stories. I've written earlier about one of the other two, Thomas Pynchon, who I think is influencing pretty much everybody past a certain point (check out Lethem, Chabon, Foster-Wallace etc). Pynchon is great for me, and my friend Norm, and plenty of other people, but he's not for everybody, and we'll leave it at that. (He might be my favorite.)
The third writer in my sphere is Haruki Murakami...this guy is just out there...for anybody who hasn't read anything by Murakami I suggest Dance Dance Dance or Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World. I read a short story of his that had a young woman as the narrator, and she had the unfortunate problem of not being able to remember her name. It turns out that a talking monkey had been stealing it, since he had only been assigned a number at the lab, and once she got her nameplate back, she never had those problems again. Murakami just goes places that you didn't think were reachable.
No comments:
Post a Comment