Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
California demon: Denis Johnson's 'Already Dead' explodes genres and other expectations on its way to something rich and really, really strange.
Aug 8, 1997 | in Denis Johnson's amazing new novel, "Already Dead," the protagonist, Nelson Fairchild, finds himself, in the middle of the night, staring down at what he mistakenly thinks is the corpse of his wife. A brilliant but ludicrously weak and alcoholic 29-year-old dope dealer, he's hired a would-be suicide to kill his wife, only to realize -- too late, as usual -- that he has made a terrible mistake and really loves her.
Denis Johnson is a writer for those of us who -- like Fairchild, if not as doomed -- came undone and never quite came back together, who lost something enormous in the blizzard of years and find ourselves staring into the void under the dinner table. If drugs led you into a strange argument with your life, or you had insights that busted you; if you violated some taboo, or just came into the world like this, obscurely broken, from the beginning ("There is a crack in everything," Leonard Cohen sings, "that's how the light gets in") -- if you are a bell that rings purest when the note of loss is hit, Johnson speaks your language. He writes the anthem for the survivors of extremity.
The instrument of Fairchild's homicidal plans, Carl Van Ness, proves to be not just a serious student of Nietzsche -- whose don't-look-down-you-might-fall-in ideas haunt "Already Dead" -- but literally a demon in human form. That Johnson should have ventured into the shiny, Byzantine-gold world of the supernatural is not entirely surprising. For he has always been drawn to the edge and the ordinary territory beyond that terrifying line, drawn to doubleness and lightning. He's a religious writer, like Melville or Dostoevsky, pursuing with exacting labor a tortured and ecstatic intensity that you might or might not call by the eight gazillion names of God.
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