Clear, dense, lyrical, convoluted as The Big Sleep, a tale of intersecting fates and levels of reality on the Mendocino Coast of California. Fairchild, the grower of pot, son of a real Steinbeckian/Keseyish owner of 10,000 acres of uncut redwood, is the cause and center of the disaster which swirls out from his clever, overheated, lying, imaginative, cowardly, self-justifying self--an inevitable screwup over a drug deal. What a cast and crew--Fairchild's schizophrenic brother, living in the redwoods where he's trying literally to avoid the radar emitting from large domes in the hills. His soon to be ex-wife, Winona, to whom the father has deeded all Fairchild's inheritance, to keep the marriage together. His little hippie mistress, Melissa, who is sleeping with everyone and has no idea how obsessed Fairchild is with her. Frankenheimer, surfer, paranoid, whom Melissa is obsessed with. Clarence Meadows, Fairchild's partner in the pot plantation. Etcetera. Mix in a witch and a cop from LA and hired killers and ministers of various stripes and soul thieves, a good heaping handful of the lingering Sixties, mix it up and pour it out among the redwoods on the world's most spectacular stretch of coastline, and you have Johnson's 'Already Dead.'Is it a mess? Probably. Is it a splendid mess? Absolutely. A Pyncheonesque outpouring of invention? Sure. However, it was Robert Stone who kept coming most to mind as I read. The book is very like a gorgeous, perilous, violent, self-justifying, Sixties-inflected Stone. The care taken in every sentence takes this book off the map into the region of pure untrammeled beauty. The richness of observation has all the earmarks of love-- for what do we see this deeply but the object of love? These deeply understood characters in all their dangerous quirks. I loved the unapologetic use of dreams and madness. That the news and newspapers figure in the book, that everyone reads and has had his or her worldview shaped by literature. Here's a random example of Johnson's descriptive firepower. Here's Fairchild's point of view: "Vagueness came up over the ridge in billows. I'd had PG&E put a street lamp at the head of the driveway, it cost less than seven dollars a month, and they took care of the thing. Its glow a quarter-mile off seemed unattainable, seemed imaginary. A large creature, an owl probably, in this atmosphere it looked white, swept up from under the edge of the hill behind me and passed directly over my head. I could hear its wingstrokes like desperate breaths. I followed around to the front of the house and watched it moving off toward the front gate and the streetlight, where its shadow opened out from behind it like a tunnel through the lamp-lit fog.The tunnel closed to nothing as the bird passed over the source, and now there was only the iridescent mist. Everything looked so much like a science-ficion comic book it hardly seemed possible to be inside it and not to be able to turn a page..." Here's Clarence Meadows, a decorated Iraqi war vet, thinking about the action which won him his scars: "But the dream had all the feelings, slowed down as if for savoring--or maybe they savored him--that during the actual events had been smeared sideways by motion and soaked in a wondrous deafness. Clarence dreamed of driving in the open jeep across Beirut with the sunrise burning over his shoulder. He didn't know what they were heading for but they were heading straight toward it. This was a general scramble of hysterical proportions, anyway, some brief, giant thing had torn into the day like a can opener..."It's a very masculine book--there are wonderful women characters, but the point of view characters are all men--another aspect which heightens the Stone-ishness of it. And I enjoyed seeing the various viewpoints of men as they considered the women and their relationships to them--with great acuity. One of my favorite parts concerned the central character, Fairchild, considering that his whole life has been built on lies. What a remarkable understanding of human weakness, the way each action has its repercussions, definitely the Karmic central theme of the book: "Maneuvering through my lies was like hopping faster than the eye would follow from branch to branch across the roof of a jungle, a jungle cultivated to cover up earlier lies, the whole business lacing back delicately to find its mother-root in my first lie, completely forgotten now, and never to be discovered by anybody else, the lie to cover my first little crime, also forgotten--no, I swear I didn't take the cookies--or more probably, a whole childhood fashioned to avoid the question of the cookies in the first place, my every move, to this day, warped around the absence of getting caught, the void where there should have been my arrest and trial and punishment: a new route to school planned in order to avoid the boy who owned the stolen cookies, and a reason invented to explain the new route to whoever might ask, and evidence concocted to demonstrate that the reason isn't a lie--I need the exercise, I'm going out for track and field--and then a career of track-and-field events and long practice in a sport that doesn't interest me, and a new personality shaped, a false persona who thrives on track and field, who loves running (But I do love running. Don't I? Or why else pend so much time doing it?) and hurdling over the intricacies of his falsehoods toward this day, Tuesday, September 4, when I'm ready to commit murder to deal with my mistakes without actually correcting them because... because I don't want to correct them. I can't survive the correcting of them. I just want them erased."I'll stop quoting but the book is covered with underlines and check marks and notes in the margins. It had some of the problems that a book told through multiple points of view often have--in dividing the readers' loyalty out among so many characters, it's hard to pull it together for a fully satisfying ending--though Johnson does his damnedest. Friends were surprised to hear that this was my first Denis Johnson--I guess people normally start with Jesus' Son. The new 'Train Dreams' is also a big hit. I happen to love Northern California, so I started here, and don't regret it. Johnson fans--Which should I read next? Jesus' Son or Train Dreams?
It’s interesting that the New Age concept of channeling plays such a prominent part in “Already Dead” as Denis Johnson seems to be trying so hard to invoke the voices of other authors. Mostly Don DeLillo. There’s an overpowering DeLillo influence here. Johnson also clomps down trails well-traveled by California fantasists Tim Powers and James Blaylock. He writes a leaden, tin-eared imitation of Elmore Leonard dialog that floats off the tongue like dribbled shot pellets. And God help us when he starts regurgitating Nietzsche to impress the black-turtleneck crowd. It’s all terribly contrived and artificial. Among the novel’s would-be-colorful cast of freaks, criminals, drug dealers, drifters, mystics, cops, surfers and assassins, there’s not one single three-dimensional human being; not one genuine, believable relationship or interaction; not one honest line of dialog that might conceivably be spoken by a real person. Occasionally, Johnson wrestles his pretensions under control to write something interesting enough to suggest there was the seed of a good novel here before it was positively buried in bullshit. What a waste. Some novels are so wondrously conceived that they take on a vibrant life in the reader’s mind. Other stories lie there stillborn, never getting off the page. “Already Dead” was aptly named.
What do You think about Already Dead (1998)?
Putting an end to the near year-long reading of Crowley fiction, I plan on switching gears to this one by Denis Johnson. My friend Geoff has raved about it for years, so it's high time I see what all the fuss is about. Also - I have to count myself among the other goodreaders who have been bested by this book in previous attempts to read it. There is something obdurate about it's narrative structure that keeps causing me to lose interest about half way through. My shame is somewhat mollified to discover that I'm not the only one...
—Bobby
He was the check-out clerk who always had something to say. Not in an annoying way; not like, just because he worked in a used book store, that made him some kind of expert. Rather, that there was a better than average chance that your purchase could give him a moment's joy. So, he didn't just zap the stuck-on bar code. He held the book. Bit by bit, his face broke into a wry smile. "'A California Gothic'"? He set this book in California, specifically with an opening scene driving on U.S. 101 in Mendocino County, but also with cultural hues like a 'time-chasm', 'karmic aether' and 'the fire-breath of her astral shelf'. A fog of cynicism, a smoke, from having one foot still in Vietnam, will not lift. We are lost. . .we are scrotally alone in the universe. There is death, but, more so, dying. The act and art of dying. He 'dates' the chapters by separate days or by a handful of days, all between August and October, 1991. Yet, even in those few months, the days crisscross, like 'Pulp Fiction', a character we know to be dead, returned to die again. Already dead. So, yes, a California Gothic.He uses constantly shifting points of view, almost always a third-person observation with a hint of omniscience. The third-person is invariably one of the handful of main male characters, the female characters having roles which allow the male characters to react or which serve to perpetuate a stereotype (a Wyccan priestess; a born-again; a Black Widow). This allows him to open virtually every chapter with a a few paragraphs of HE, challenging the reader to identify which of the guys is wandering in the fog. In a few chapters, he failed to figure out which he he was writing about.He is not unintelligent, some say, but he can be an asshole, others believe.One of the main characters is a cop, flawed, but with a capacity for understanding. It wasn't the badge's fault. The badge caused nothing. It didn't give you the disease, it only warned the others that you had it.Modern movements might nod knowingly, in unison; might bookmark it for later usage. But that's not what this was about. This was neither chant not rant. It was a Blues. Of souls lost in a certain time and a certain place. California Purples.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKzg...
—Tony
Where to begin, where to end, and of course what thoughts do I not say? The last question would be what Denis Johnson forgo to ask himself, the characters are all what you would expect from his writing: lost, searching for some faded dream that is usually fueled by too many ingested chemicals. But that's not the problem of course, the problem would be this feels not even like a first draft but an earlier version where even ideas were still left in the text. This is a hard read, the narration switched from first to third so much, and in that you loose the best of all the main characters ( yes that is correct, the way this is written their are around 8 of them) Van Ness. I really wanted so much more from this book, but it's length and time spent on characters and sub plots that meant nothing made me only want to shut the book and read Jesus Son again.
—Matt
