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Nobody Move (2009)

by Denis Johnson(Favorite Author)

3.29 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0374222908 (ISBN13: 9780374222901)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: Elmore Leonard has made a career of writing great novels featuring really nasty characters. He specializes in losers, hucksters, cons, shysters, deadbeats, and thugs of all types. As repulsive as his leading characters often are, the reader is usually able to find enough redeeming qualities in at least one of them to capture his/her sympathies. Nobody Move by Denis Johnson is written in Leonard's trademark style. The characters and plot are just as delightfully loathsome. In fact, I can imagine you being a fan of one without immediately falling in love with the other. Denis Johnson is best known for Tree of Smoke, winner of the 2007 Award for Fiction. He's also authored half a dozen other novels and novellas, some plays, several poetry collections, a high... morely acclaimed short story collection titled Jesus' Son, and Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, a nonfiction work that chronicles two decades of travel around America, Africa and Afghanistan. I didn't know any of that stuff until I looked Johnson up on Wikipeida. In fact, I didn't know anything about the author before Nobody Move landed in my lap. And now that I've read it, I'm even more intrigued. Nobody Move is a fast paced story highlighted by a lot of the aforementioned losers, cons, shysters, etc. They're out for money. They're out for vengeance. They're out for sex, some vodka and a pack of smokes. Loyalties change with the wind and, in the end, are just as reliable. The main character is a barber shop choir singer named Johnny Lutz. Don't be fooled. Johnny ain't no choir boy. He's made some poor decisions, locked horns with the wrong people and ends up on the run where he meets a beautiful drunk with problems of her own. Here's the thing, and I've really got to hand it to the author here. Lutz is pond scum. That's true at the beginning of the story, at the end, and pretty much everywhere in between. There's no real reason to pull for him, not even when It looks like he's going to have his balls forcibly removed. Still, I found myself hoping he'd survive, succeed, catch a break for once in his lousy excuse for a life. I can't explain it but I loved the book, even though some things weren't resolved as tidily as you might like. Johnson's writing style is compelling, unique, a little risky, and I'm looking forward to reading more from him.
review 2: The blurb on the back made this sound like it was a schlocky, purely for shits and giggles Johnson novel, a mere playful homage to the noir genre. But for me, it was way, way more. The characters were too nuanced, their struggles too acute, for me to just write it off as some modern spin on Chandler and the rest of the gang. The writing was fast-paced and pared-back to suit the story's style, but it still contained many of those beautiful Johnson moments--the vivid descriptions, the hilarious, off-beat dialogue, and all those impossible metaphors that couldn't be more spot-on. At times I found myself rereading certain passages simply for the joy of the language. If there's a criticism of the novel, it's that Johnson digs his characters in pretty deep, and even though I loved the ending, it's hard to imagine a particularly rosy afterlife for them. Certain threads of the story also get left a little unfinished, and not in a cool, haunting kind of way, but in a 'I would've liked a bit more info there' sense. Still, on the whole, I enjoyed it thoroughly. It's not for everyone, as a lot of the reviews on here imply, but if you enjoy stories about desperate people doing increasingly desperate things, you'll love this little gem. less

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