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The enduring power of America's favorite icon
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--------------alreadydead
++++BY DENIS JOHNSON
BY DWIGHT GARNER | Denis Johnson stirs the sacred into the profane as well as any writer alive, and in his aggressively written and shaggily intellectual new novel -- about a small universe of misfits, burnouts and mystics in laid-back Northern California -- even the sex scenes bear his distinctive stamp. "I felt alien vibrations as we made love in her narrow bed," says the book's protagonist, Nelson Fairchild Jr., "our knees and elbows banging the trailer walls, and when I came, I ejaculated a paranoid essence." "Already Dead" ejaculates its own paranoid seed. It's a big, frazzled, noirish book that reads like "Vineland"-era Thomas Pynchon as imagined by Robert Stone and Hunter S. Thompson. Almost everyone in it is obsessed with staring over his shoulder (nearly all the characters are men) at the demons -- real or imagined -- that are gunning for him. Johnson's plot, related from multiple and overlapping angles, defies tidy summary. Suffice it to say that "Already Dead" revolves largely around the misfortunes of Fairchild, the bewildered (and possibly disinherited) heir to a logging fortune. He tells us about "my business woes, my wife, my mistress, my region. My idiot brother. My ugly father. What am I but the knot, the gnarled dark intersection, of all these strands? If I want to move, they all have to be ripped apart." In the wake of a botched drug deal, Fairchild is being followed by two goons who want him dead. Strapped for cash, Fairchild wants his own wife dead -- and he convinces Van Ness, a drifter bent on suicide (he is "already dead"), to do the job for him. Many other drifters and hard-luck cases become entwined in the tale, most notably a former L.A. cop named Navarro who finds himself spinning down into the region's amoral ethos.
Sound like a macho page-turner? Not even close. "Already Dead" has its antenna tuned to far stranger frequencies. Johnson turns these goings on -- they are by turn hilarious and deadly serious -- into a series of acute, and occasionally bizarre, meditations on religion, philosophy and how evil seeps into the world. Occasionally he overreaches: You're not sure you're ready for a brutal fight scene in which the two combatants quote Nietzsche at one another between blows. And I wish he hadn't told the story from quite so many warring points-of-view; reading "Already Dead" feels more like cranking a kaleidoscope than tightening the focus on a pair of binoculars. But for the most part Johnson handles this tale, and its High Seriousness (there are allusions to Emerson, Wittgenstein, the Talmud, Whitman), with genuine aplomb. The fact that he's a wicked stylist, and a very funny one, helps. The novel is strewn with brainy, manic one-liners. (On Nietzsche: "How could anyone with five successive consonants in his name be right?" And: "There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can be tested only by suicide.") "Already Dead" succeeds as a chilling exploration of evil, of how "random facts" can "coalesce in a geometry of crushing significance." It's a novel that leaves you feeling, as one character memorably puts it, that "We are lost ... We are scrotally alone in this universe."
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