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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Shades of Ken Kesey, January 21, 2001
Having read and enjoyed Denis Johnson's collection of loosely connected short stories, "Jesus' Son," I was excited to find a remaindered copy of his novel, "Already Dead" at the bookstore. I had pegged Johnson as a minimalist on the basis of "Jesus' Son," a relatively quick read, but this more recent offering ran to over 430 pages. It took some hundred pages to get a handle on the plot, but once the expository smoke had cleared and I had acclimated myself to Johnson's cast of quirky characters, the book began to take hold of my imagination. The story involves a young man, Nelson Fairchild, the scion of a wealthy North California family, who makes a pact with the "devil" (in the form of a suicidal but otherwise underdrawn phantom named Carl Van Ness) to kill his wife, Winona, who stands between him and his inheritance. Other characters, including John Navarro, a police officer transplanted from the killing fields of L.A. to bucolic coastal Northern California, and Clarence Meadows, Fairchild's partner in a marijauna farm, weave in and out of the narrative haze, but with limited impact on the reader. The conclusion is less than satisfying, but I remain impressed by Johnson himself. As a stylist he demonstrates an uncanny grasp of contemporary idiom, which includes a killer vocabulary (he added both "jactitation" and "trigetour" to my humble lexicon). "Already Dead" appears to owe something to another author whose locus is the American West Coast, Ken Kesey, in the epic sense of "Sometimes a Great Notion" and in the surreal, stream-of-consciousness of both that novel and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Kesey's muse burned out early; I hope that Johnson will continue to develop as an artist, next time in the service of a more powerful story.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent spiritual noir, February 9, 1998
By A Customer
I had no intention of writing anything about this book - having just finished it I wondered what others thought of it. The two short bewilderingly negative reviews of this book surprised me, but notice that they had little to back up their view. Even the person who loaned me this book did not think it was great, and while it was certainly not as impressive as Jesus' Son (which stunned me in its brevity and impact), it held my attention throughout, even, as another reviewer wrote, you knew - to some degree - what would happen. Hell, just read the title and you know what'll happen. Perhaps the fact this book requires a bit of effort from the reader is what put off the reviewers that gave it such a low rating. But what good book doesn't? Yes, the chgaracters are in various states of mental crisis, alcohol and drug effects and after-effects, and real and imagined paranoia; so when do those ingredients make for bad noir? Johnson allowed me to feel different ways about the characters throughout the book depending on who described them, including one who appears for only a few pages (and a bit later as first a lifeless corpse and then a slightly less lifeless one) and another who never appears at all, which makes me wonder if ALL of the characters' take on that guy is completely off-base. There's dialogue worthy of the better bits of McGuane, long rambling letters that read with great panic fever, and hilarious bits about Nietzsche, who should always be good for a laugh, but is seldom used to excellent effect. More spiritual than Angels, and longer than Jesus' Son, if you love the way Johnson writes than the more the better.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Another work of excellence by a master of surrealist fiction, September 7, 1999
By A Customer
I, too, am bewildered, and more than a little amused, by the dismissive (and ultimately insubstantial) negative comments of other readers. How can one read this book and not be impressed? Agreed, this was not Johnson's best work, but it should be obvious to any thoughtful reader that this is a gifted writer, and that this novel--like each of Johnson's in its own way--is unique and thought-provoking and, yes, compelling. Those who are "bored" with this novel should probably not tax their poor brain cells too much. For them, a little friendly advice: Stick to Grisham or Clancy. "Already Dead" is neither "Jesus' Son" nor "Angels" nor "Fiskadoro"--but then, asking him to repeatedly crank out more of the same is a little like complaining that Dylan refuses to keep re-writing "Like a Rolling Stone." Johnson takes huge risks with each outing and obviously intentionally avoids the mainstream--and admittedly this novel is not perfect. But it undoubtedly ranks among the top five or six literary works of 1997-98. An excellent work: simultaneously funny, bizarre, stunning, off-beat, and hallucinatory--in other words, typical Johnson.
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