Vol. 1, Number 3	Fall 1998 issue

 

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In case California culture hadn't before been described in druggie language and vehicular locales, Denis Johnson offers a "California Gothic," Already Dead. The book is yet another depiction of the decadent new age lifestyle: seeking spirituality without God in a small, incestuous circle of homicidal, suicidal friends.

Nelson Fairchild is a drug dealer, a murderer by one remove. His brother, Billy, retreats to the redwoods to indulge a festering paranoia about the outside world. We follow Nelson through 16 dated chapters into a strange afterlife where he describes the details of his wife's affair with a murderer named Van Ness. Fairchild's life-and-death margin is the only one made explicitly visible, but the book is in fact a series of near-death experiences--each resurrection a grimy, organic one rather than some grand awakening.

The characters in Already Dead flail around for guidance in a geography of dust storms and endless highway systems. One screams for forgiveness in the aisles of the Holy Cross Chapel. Others simply screw. They never near God, if they can help it, and seem to grope for guns at their most serious losses.

Already Dead is intentionally vague, its plot intentionally complex. This furthers Johnson's anticonventional end: the idea of endlessness, of fate and of our ultimate (rather than immediate) irrelevance. Frankheimer, former shipmate of Van Ness, says at the beginning of the novel that truth for him is a "formless uniformity, the fullness of emptines." But this idea shouldn't render humanity immediately impotent. In fact, realizing this truth, Frankheimer says, "Wow, [that makes] my dick hard!"

Johnson's book is a philosophical melting pot. Characters toss around Wittgenstein, Neitzsche, even "the warrior's way" or bushido, "the art of being already dead." Van Ness most literalizes the book's Neitzschean undertones, actively battling his human conditioning, overriding every one of his conscience's overrides. He has stalled at what Neitzsche describes as the second stage of man's journey: that of the camel, who breaks societal bonds. Van Ness does not believe in Neitzsche's third stage: that of the child, who reaffirms life with a sacred "Yes." Says Van Ness to Fairchild, "Child of whom? Nurtured and cared for by what?" Van Ness becomes the book's most dangerous character, and kills of many of his friends to fuel his own journey.

The central problem with Johnson's novel is that he has too much visible control. Every possible analysis of the book is included in its text. I decided early in the novel that Johnson didn't respect me as a reader, didn't trust my analytical instincts. Why otherwise would he offer so much spelled-out philosophical explanation for his voice and those of his characters? Meta-fiction is interesting, but only when executed with subtlety-an area in which Johnson, perhaps intentionally, is really deficient.

At the same time, his loose distribution of philosophies suggests an unfortunate lack of control. Johnson often gets carried away with his own poetic voice, losing his narrative in self-indulgent lyricism.

Johnson's instinct is to balance the majesty of his story's content and context (sex, death and miraculous geography) with incidental details. This instinct in some senses redeems his novel; details ground me as a reader and reactivate my interest. Some-a juggler in a graveyard-are playful, delightful fantasies. Others constitute calm, honest observations: an elderly couple at a diner, for example, "sink to the bottom of marital silence in their vinyl booth."

California's reputation is already precariously oriented towards new-age spirituality and mindless crime. Perhaps this book should be recommended only to native Californians. All others should stay away, lest they be influenced negatively towards the landscape Johnson describes, buying into bogus boosterism combined with an overdone rendering of California as remote, numb, Godless, Godforsaken. Why perpetuate a false mythology? Particularly a mythology that, God willing, is already dead.