Already Dead: A California Gothic, by Denis Johnson, is among the stranger books I've read in a while, and for followers of this blog, you know that takes a bit of doing. It is a loose, freewheeling drug-trip (quite intentionally) of a novel, maybe more delightful to reluctant Californians like me than to True Believers in the Golden State. The characters ramble through a semi-mythical Northern CA filled with redwoods and pot groves and hippies and witches and a giant and the deeply, criminally insane. Nobody in the book is remotely likable, but the poetic style of the prose of the book becomes almost a character, unto itself. It will be off-putting to many readers, I think, but I found it lovely for long stretches. A paragraph should suffice to tell you if you want in or not:
"Past the boardwalk onto the street, the gauntlet of shops and beachside people, the quantum dregs, the never-ending pavement in their sighs, and always that music, dark rock. And you kept going, beyond the seaside part of town. Homes of stucco in the ashy twilight, the street no longer dabbed with sand. Past the edges, way way past, out into the big place east of town, they call it America."
Give it a second read. Lovely.
The shifting narrators, the loosely stitched plot, and the poetry of the text make the ostensible noir crime drama seem like an existential investigation, which surely is the intent. The hard-boiled detective genre washes ashore in this romantic 'California Gothic' tale, leaving me, at any rate, delighted.
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