Already Dead - Denis Johnson
Separated from his wife, and pursued by hitmen because of a drug-deal gone wrong, Nelson Fairchild Jr is in deep trouble. The main protagonist of Denis Johnson's Already Dead, Fairchild is a small-time marijuana grower who’s separated from his wife and estranged from his father.
The plot of Already Dead turns on a stipulation that Nelson's wealthy, curmudgeonly father has put in his will: that if Nelson divorces his wife, Winona, his inheritance will pass to her not him. It’s upon this simple legal detail that the elaborate edifice of Already Dead is built.
In danger of losing his inheritance and the marijuana crop that’s his only chance of paying off his criminal partners, Nelson is fenced in on all sides. Enter Carl Van Ness. Van Ness, with his small spectacles and Fu Manchu moustache, is an oddity. He is in Mendocino County to pay a visit to his mentor, Wilhelm Frankheimer, a seven-foot giant nicknamed “Frankenstein”. Like his fictional precursor, Frankenstein has inadvertently created a monster in Van Ness, who, at Frankheimer's instigation, “read four words of Nietzsche” (beyond good and evil) “and went out and built a life” (252).
These four words become Van Ness' manifesto, propelling him through Mendocino County and into the lives of the Fairchild family. Nelson Fairchild's meeting with Van Ness acts as a catalyst for the action in Already Dead. Nelson, habitually a thinker and not a doer, thinks out loud to Van Ness, a man of action, and sets off a conspiracy that he can neither anticipate nor control.
Denis Johnson takes these staples of noir fiction—an inheritance, underworld retribution, and a stranger—and weaves them into something wholly unanticipated: a thriller that’s also a meditation on identity, spirituality, solipsism, and the traffic between reality and dreams.
One of Johnson's achievements in Already Dead is to clothe all this in glorious prose: “At the moments most precarious for my sanity I'm lost somewhere on these back roads, teetering on these cliffs, witnessing this grandness and longing to match it with the grandest gestures, acts equally solitary and monstrous, things I can never confess. Is it possible for you to understand?—to imagine?—coming around a curve onto a cliff and looking over the dry evergreens and silent dusty arroyos as far as your eye will go, and seeing a stream that cuts through the bottom of the chasm so far below that you can't hear it, and find five black buzzards who stand, trembling, in the middle of the air?” (30)
This prose—clean, balanced, and beautiful—is married to a lurid, off-kilter world reminiscent of David Lynch's best work, Twin Peaks and Lost Highway. In Already Dead, paranoia, drugs, and madness blur the line between reality and nightmare: “As the man started to drift off to sleep he suddenly wondered with alarm if these wishes weren't being granted, perhaps, by some sort of devil. Sure enough, a terrifying devil, red as anger, huge and stinking of rot, appeared before him. And right in front of his wife and gorgeous home, the monster tore him to pieces and ate him”. (21)
The novel boasts a plot that’s simple in its essence, if not in its treatment. Johnson's most daring device is his vertiginous crosscutting of character, time, and place—so much so that at times Already Dead recalls Faulkner's experimentation with time and narrative in The Sound and the Fury. Like Faulkner, Johnson jettisons a simple, linear narrative in favour of confusing, often dislocated scenes that forcibly plant the reader in the characters' present.
Consequently, the overarching themes of Already Dead are occasionally lost in the firestorm of images, chronological shifts, and perspective changes. The reader is hard put to remain oriented, let alone begin to decipher the themes, codes, and symbols that sit on every page of Already Dead awaiting decryption. This is a situation that Johnson elliptically acknowledges in the opening pages: “Offshore, the small lights of fishing-boats float in the dark: if you let them they'll start symbolizing everything”.
Fortunately, Johnson furnishes the reader with a guide in the form of John Navarro, a cop who has transferred from the bedlam of Los Angeles to Mendocino County. Like the reader, Navarro is often bemused and out of his depth as deaths and disappearances begin to multiply, and he belatedly tries to piece together what happened.
Already Dead is a novel that confounds straightforward classification. It most resembles a thriller, but a thriller with occult, spiritual, and philosophical preoccupations, all of which are lightened by moments of slapstick. This genre-bending is both a strength and a weakness. Seen in its most positive light, it’s a fresh and unpredictable synthesis of many different elements. However, it could just as easily be seen as shapeless, self-indulgent, and opaque.
That said, Already Dead has been compared to Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, Blood Meridian, as well as to Moby Dick and Dracula. In truth, Already Dead never manages to scale these heights, but the fact that these comparisons ring as many bells as they do is recommendation enough.
Score: 7/10
-- Hans Fruck
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