The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson
Irving Malin

Denis Johnson. Already Dead: A California Gothic. HarperCollins, 1997. 435 pp. $25.00.

Although Johnson is drawn to sinners, deviants, and criminals, he does not glorify them. Instead, he attempts to find “virtues” in their misguided choices. He is interested in the possibilities of their conversion, their secret longings for salvation. The fact that his Catholic background has nourished his art helps him in his mission. He never preaches; he never writes propaganda. Johnson is interested in the “in-betweens,” those people who still desire some tiny measure of grace. And in his new novel, he uses his heightened poetic language to shine light into his California Gothic. His rushing, driving sentences are a bit excessive, but they are saved by radiant phrasing, unexpected metaphors and strange beauty.
The two main characters—who are curious doubles—are Nelson Fairchild, Jr. and Carl Van Ness. Both are half-alive, ghostly “shades”; they are drawn to each other because they are “doomed.” There is, perhaps, a sexual attraction, but they understand their greater need to violate morality, their murderous and/or suicidal urges. They are, in Leonard Cohen’s wonderful phrase, “beautiful losers.”
Words tend to inspire a sense of dread, awe, other universes that are filled with magical transformations and transgressions. Fairchild, who longs to kill his father and wife, thinks aloud: “When you die, your consciousness blanks out, but it resumes eons later, when the history of molecules has been revised enough to preclude your death due to those particular circumstances: the bullet hits your brain in this world, but in a later one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch.” The entire novel tests the limits of thresholds (psychological, religious, linguistic); it explores the “brink of intelligibility.”
Johnson’s California is, perhaps, a stranger land than Pynchon’s Vineland; it is a miraculous realm, another “universe” in which transubstantiations occur so suddenly that we are never sure whether the big earthquake will occur. Maybe Johnson believes it is occurring right now. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson Irving Malin Denis Johnson. Already Dead: A California Gothic. HarperCollins, 1997. 435 pp. $25.00. Although Johnson is drawn to sinners, deviants, and criminals, he does not glorify them. Instead, he attempts to find “virtues” in their misguided choices. He is interested in the possibilities of their conversion, their secret longings for salvation. The fact that his Catholic background has nourished his art helps him in his mission. He never preaches; he never writes propaganda. Johnson is interested in the “in-betweens,” those people who still desire some tiny measure of grace. And in his new novel, he uses his heightened poetic language to shine light into his California Gothic. His rushing, driving sentences are a bit excessive, but they are saved by radiant phrasing, unexpected metaphors and strange beauty. The two main characters—who are curious doubles—are Nelson Fairchild, Jr. and Carl Van Ness. Both are half-alive, ghostly “shades”; they are drawn to each other because they are “doomed.” There is, perhaps, a sexual attraction, but they understand their greater need to violate morality, their murderous and/or suicidal urges. They are, in Leonard Cohen’s wonderful phrase, “beautiful losers.” Words tend to inspire a sense of dread, awe, other universes that are filled with magical transformations and transgressions. Fairchild, who longs to kill his father and wife, thinks aloud: “When you die, your consciousness blanks out, but it resumes eons later, when the history of molecules has been revised enough to preclude your death due to those particular circumstances: the bullet hits your brain in this world, but in a later one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch.” The entire novel tests the limits of thresholds (psychological, religious, linguistic); it explores the “brink of intelligibility.” Johnson’s California is, perhaps, a stranger land than Pynchon’s Vineland; it is a miraculous realm, another “universe” in which transubstantiations occur so suddenly that we are never sure whether the big earthquake will occur. Maybe Johnson believes it is occurring right now. [Irving Malin]

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