New West Book Review

Busted Candy: Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move”

By Jenny Shank, 6-01-09

Nobody Move
by Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 196 pages, $23

Northern Idaho-based novelist Denis Johnson has followed up his sprawling, National-Book Award winning Tree of Smoke with Nobody Move, a quick book he’s described as ”cheap pulp fiction.” Playboy serialized the novel last year, and it’s a wild, bullet-riddled ride that begins, oddly enough, as Jimmy Luntz takes the stage with the Alhambra California Beachcomber Chordsmen, a barbershop chorus entered in a competition in which they finish seventeenth out of twenty.  But Johnson leaves this intriguing world behind the moment after he presents it, as the book moves relentlessly forward, chasing the trouble that Luntz gets into over a gambling debt to a smalltime Bakersfield gangster named Juarez.

As he leaves the competition, dressed in a “blinding white tux,” Luntz encounters Gambol, “A tall, sad man in expensive slacks and shoes, camel-hair sports coat, one of those white straw hats that senior-citizen golfers wear.” Juarez has sent Gambol to collect Luntz, who has fallen behind on his payments.  Johnson jumps ahead then to the moment after Luntz has shot Gambol in the leg and is calling an ambulance.  “Am I supposed to sit around and wait for you to break my arm?” he says to the bleeding Gambol.  Luntz has never shot anybody before, and his lack of nerve in failing to finish Gambol off has dire repercussions.  He takes off with Gambol’s fat wallet in his Cadillac, while Gambol crawls away to hide himself from the police.  Gambol calls Juarez, who says he knows a vet who might be able to doctor him.

Meanwhile, the beautiful Anita Desilvera is downing massive quantities of vodka so she won’t have to think about the legal penalties she faces because her lawyer husband (soon to be ex) has framed her in a $2.3 million embezzlement scheme he cooked up with a crooked judge.  She ends up drinking and performing bad karaoke in the same bar that Luntz fetches up at when he’s trying to figure out a plan.  They hook up and team up once they realize they are both in dire predicaments, and Anita turns out to be as ruthless as any gangster she encounters.

The vet Juarez sends to pick up the wounded Gambol turns out to be not a veterinarian but a veteran military nurse, Mary, who also is Juarez’s ex-wife.  She becomes one of the most interesting characters in this motley lot, a “hefty blond” tending to Gambol’s wounds in a makeshift way at her home, using supplies she stole from her last legitimate medical gig.  She’s a full-service nurse, cooking up steak-and-egg breakfasts and administering sexual favors along with pain medication.  Before Gambol is sufficiently healed, against Mary’s advice, he limps out on the hunt for revenge.

Nobody Move rides on its dialogue, which is hard-bitten and snappy, as in this exchange in which Juarez tells Luntz about the sort of revenge he can expect for what he did to Gambol:

“‘Listen to me, Luntz.  Do you remember this fucker Cal from Anaheim, they called him Cal Trans?’
‘Yeah, sure, I heard all about that stuff.’
‘Gambol and I sat down and made a meal of his balls.  Anaheim oysters.  Very tasty.’
‘I heard all about it, yeah.’
‘What about Luntzville?  They make pretty good oysters there?’
Luntz said, ‘Best oysters in the world, Juarez,’ and hung up.”

Johnson doesn’t spend much space on description, but when he does he achieves an evocative noir poetry: “After the film it was raining, a light, steady rain.  Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.”

The rest of the plot consists of a chase, some double-crossing, and a big violent finale.  The tension often surfaces as an agonizing undercurrent to the characters’ light banter, especially in a scene where Juarez and Gambol prepare to collect some more Anaheim oysters.  Nobody Move is simultaneously retro and up-to-the-minute, echoing past crime novels, yet making its own fresh music.  With its quick cuts, witty language, and plentiful violence, Nobody Moves feels like it’s already a movie and reads like a guilty pleasure.

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