Already Dead: A California Gothic

Denis Johnson. Denis fucking Johnson! How can you smile like some frat boy on the back of your book? You have truths and demons and angels in your head! How can you smile so smugly? With this book you have given me hope for modern literature. You have given me hope for art, for humanity. Of all of the living writers (I should specify fiction writers) that I rate seriously talented: 1) Nick Tosches, 2) Denis Johnson; 3) A.M. Homes; 4) Madeline Gins; 5) Deborah Levy. That's it. There are no more! "Already Dead" is a screaming mugging of Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra". It is a mind-blowing bitch-slap to today's modernity. Thank you Denis, smile and all. You've got it. For good or evil, you have it.

Rarely does one encounter fiction which transports the reader completely outside themselves, immersing them in vividly captured landscapes of Redwoods & rolling ridges rising out of hazy, distant Pacific; it's as if we're right there ourselves, a character, viewing through another's eyes the Lost Coast of Northern California. Each time I opened Already Dead, I forgot about my life and what I had been or was about to be doing. I was transfixed in the reading, completely in the moment, page by page, word by word. I wasn't reading so much as going out-of-body, watching events transpire around me. No, I'm not stoned on incense or marijuana man, like so many of the ruined lives in Already Dead. High art, like Already Dead, transports its show more audience outside themselves, into trippy realities, and Denis Johnson, poet, novelist, spiritualist, is high art's medium. His talent tramsports our lives into lives surrealy interweaved with landscapes [this review is under construction] -- , places where we get pleasantly lost, where realities blend with the surreal so that the former becomes indecipherable from the latter, and new perspectives, world views are forged. I could blather on about the plot, the much praised poetic language, how the Lost Coast of California's a perfect metaphor for the lives Johnson describes -- and these are all indeed vital elements worthy of discussion and analysis (and they're discussed elsewhere here in LT) -- but these elements pale in impact to what Already Dead elicits out of its more sympathetic readers: an almost altered state of consciousness; a state of what amounts to Zen meditation; spiritual transcendence. I've never considered myself a spiritual/mystical person, but I''ve discovered that in reading Denis Johnson and Already Dead, I may be more the mystic than I ever realized. show less

Welcome to the Hotel California …

Johnson must not think much of Northern Californians, the entire cast of Already Dead is misogynistic, drug addled, possessed by demons, or just flat-out insane. That’s not to say that it’s not an enjoyable read, his use of language is often stunning, it’s just that there isn’t anyone in the book to root for. Halfway through the 435-page novel, I was hoping a tidal wave would just sweep all of them out into the Pacific Ocean. And yet …

And yet I just kept reading.

In which Denis Johnson whips James Ellroy at his own game. Well, perhaps it isn't exactly fair to compare these two writers: Ellory's doesn't hide the fact that his fiction is historical and decidedly nostalgic, while Johnson sets his book among contemporary post-hippie Californians. Even so, despite the fact that "Already Dead" has more than its share of problems, it does the "evil beneath the warm sunshine" thing much better than Ellroy does. The difference is most decidedly in the prose. Most thrillers are said to be disposable -- quick to write and easy to read, and heavy on the stock characters and situations -- Johnson's prose here is dense, knotty, intricate and occasionally incendiary but I got the impression that the author show more invested vast amounts of energy and time into this novel. The prose has a weight -- an imposing sort of self-propelled force -- that makes it worth reading, even if thrillers, or the seamy side of literature, isn't your thing. His description of the physical features of coastal California's landscape: it's weird beauty, it's fecundity, it's inaccessibility and its loneliness, are particularly skillful, as are his descriptions of the place's loose, acid drenched, and slightly sinister vibe. I imagine that readers who appreciate the quirkier elements in T. Coraghassen Boyle's novels will find a lot to like in "Already Dead." The author's going for an almost narcotic sense of unreality here, I think, and much of the time I think he achieves it.

This isn't to say that the novel itself is entirely successful. I like Johnson's modern take on the noir: where you expect streetwise sharpies, he gives you washed out, decidedly rural bumblers. The demons they face -- listlessness, self-indulgence, drugs, and seductive New Age belief systems -- probably weren't all that familiar to Dashiell Hammet's protagonists. Johnson's characters are badly flawed: casualties of the social shifts of the nineteen sixties and of their own awful family histories, but I sometimes had trouble judging the author's intent. Is Van Ness, an aspiring Nietzschean, there to provide the critique of a philosophy or a commentary on the nature of evil, or are his ideas just window-dressing on an ordinary villain? Do the book's central protagonists say something about the cultural shift that the United States underwent since the mid-sixties, or are they merely a bunch of freaks with bad histories and substance abuse issues? It can be difficult to tell, and this ambiguity sometimes weighs the book down. Whatever other similarities this book shares with genre literature, efficiency isn't one of them. For all its astonishingly fresh, boundary-breaking prose, the book often feels slow and draggy, and I imagine that some readers may abandon it before they reach its last page. Still, if you're interested in good modern writing, or unconventional crime stories, or literature about California, or are just interested in the macabre, "Already Dead" might be a book that you need to read. show less

This is a big, sprawling West Coast sort of a mess. You can almost smell the pot smoke wafting out from between the pages. The characters and situations are larger and more colorful than life, you know, like how things look when you've got a righteous buzz on. Yes, it's confusing at times. Yes, it could be tighter. But in true DJ style, Already Dead's surface craziness mask an fascinating look at the connection between the spiritual and the hedonistic.

With language that is luminous at times, Johnson contrasts the beauty of coastal Northern California with the substance and rage induced behavior of some inhabitants. Although not really a crime novel there is plenty of crime to go around. Johnson mostly concerns himself with the demons in his characters and how most of them unsuccessfully attempt to keep them at bay, or not.

"She said she had cancer of the liver but cured it with her mind." This book drags in parts but anything that could be described as new age noir is a flan-trap that can't be unsprung. Reads like Billy Wilder via Leonard Cohen.