NIETZSCHE NOIR

DENIS JOHNSON'S `ALREADY DEAD' TRIES TO BRING GUYS IN THE NEW AGE

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, August 3, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

And then came the 1960s, when even war novels lost their crimson glow and psychedelia was just an updated symbol for nihilist chic. Writers as good as Robert Stone and Raymond Carver turned the tough-guy school into something utterly scary and dark, where the idea of God waited in the alleys alongside evil's trenchcoat -- but only if you were lucky and not because you were saved. Along with a host of lesser imitators, poet and novelist Denis Johnson appeared on this broken-glass landscape in the early 1980s; his first novel, ``Angels,'' was a haunting story of itinerant losers that seemed surfeited in predawn dread. The novels that followed -- among them ``The Stars at Noon'' and ``Resuscitation of a Hanged Man'' -- continued this arc of inner terror; it was only with Johnson's 1992 stories, ``Jesus's Son,'' that he took his characteristic alienation to a new Beckettian level. While their dimensions sometimes seemed claustrophobic, the stories were flawlessly crafted, evoking a depth of feeling in two or three lines of dialogue that most writers can't manage in a page. Whatever Johnson's failings, they are not about language; even when he's describing a little chamber of hell that's been done to death, he does so with exquisite prose.

So the title of ``Already Dead: A California Gothic'' seemed to reverberate with Johnson's sensibility, and I began it as a longtime, if qualified, admirer of his work. And readers who share my regard will surely find a universe of Johnson touches here: The lush spiritual vortex of Mendocino County, inhabited by pot dealers and New Age charlatans and mixed-up, broken-hearted ambulatories and a few versions of Beelzebub, wearing pony tails or sipping whiskey out of half-pint bottles. The plot of his story he has attributed to Bill Knott, whose ``Poeme Noire'' must have provided him with the following variation on boy-meets-girl: Weak, wealthy screw-up engages strong, evil madman to help him resolve the tangles of an impotent life, among them an uppity wife and a patriarchal dad. Strong, evil madman, never pretending to be anything else, performs the ultimate con. Mayhem and blood lust spill over California redwoods, with incense and windchimes and desperate religions no match for homicidal maniacs -- especially ones who know their Nietzsche.

Some of the writing in ``Already Dead'' is terrific; Johnson is in rare company when it comes to getting inside a sociopath's head or the infinity of fear. But the novel succumbs to an infatuation with its own strengths, not to mention its own darkness, and a lot of it is a mess. You have to love a character (or at least be interested in him) to follow him through endless riffs of dreams, drunken epiphanies, or being hunted in the forest, but Johnson has limited most of his cast to their own psychiatric diagnoses and pathological impulses. Even Wilhelm Frankenstein, the 6-foot-9, drug-addicted hermit who has about him a glimmer of a moral life, winds up seeming no more than the sum of his syringes.

All this is fun for about 100 pages, until ``Already Dead'' -- the title is an ironic nod to the samurai warrior's art of detachment -- degenerates into a tale of the hunted and the hunt. But first there is Nelson Fairchild Jr., bad-boy pot dealer, who has chickened out on a coke run in Rome and consequently has a price on his head. And there is Carl Van Ness, suicidal desperado and former merchant seaman, whom Fairchild saves from drowning and who then begins to appropriate the wreckage that was Fairchild's life. Money is at the root of this evil: The dying Fairchild pater owns 10,000 acres of California redwoods, which his son stands to inherit only if he stays married to his unloved wife, Winona. But Nelson's sights are already recast onto a glazed-eyed little hippie named Melissa, and he believes Van Ness's debt to him can be repaid by his getting Winona out of the picture. What ensues is a pact between what Nietzsche would call the arrogant and the weak, further complicated by a cop fighting his own violent impulses and a couple of lifers posing as pig hunters.

The northern California of ``Already Dead'' is realistically evoked, from its verdant excesses to its fourth-dimensional walking wounded, and Johnson captures the state of universal paranoia with authenticity. (``I'm not making it out there,'' Nelson tells his broken, hermitic brother, Bill. ``No,'' Bill answers. ``Nobody is.'') Two of the most empathically realized characters in the novel are the giant Frankenstein, a ``walking eclipse of the sun'' who's an old shipmate of Van Ness's, and Bill Fairchild, who manages his own probable schizophrenia by taking to the woods. The Luciferian pig hunters aren't a bad act, either, reminding one of how even demonic characters can be a pleasure to come across if they're adequately rendered.

But those guys aren't supposed to have any dimension other than evil, whereas the most important people to the story -- Nelson, Van Ness, and Navarro, the cop -- ought to have a struggle larger or more compelling than their own private whirlwinds of darkness. The one exception to this problem can be found in Nelson's partner, Clarence, who shows up in the last half of the novel to provide us with a hair-raising exploit of vengeance; if he's more action than thought, he's at least honestly realized. On the other hand, every woman in the novel (including Melissa the space queen, Winona the ice queen, and Yvonne the witch queen) is delivered without benefit of a whit of psychological depth. They're cardboard Mendocino girls, and, in keeping with the male fantasy that seems to have invented them, they all want to sleep with every man in sight.

This is distressing, and it hurts the novel's internal credibility. Worse, though, is the impulse to turn what is really a hipster adventure tale into a Nietzschean quest about fate and rebirth, personified by Van Ness's cowboy psychosis and Nelson's weak-hearted deal with the devil. Navarro the cop gets some of the best lines in the novel, and probably the only shred of hope: He realizes, when the mayhem has run its course, that ``he didn't own this loneliness. He dangled down into it and so did innumerable others. It's not ours. It was here before we came.''

In some ways that insight is the center of ``Already Dead,'' but it's nearly obscured by the novel's rambling pursuits and philosophical bluster. What's good about Johnson's novel is its lush prose, its penetrating look into the airless rooms of human darkness. What's less tolerable can be summed up by Nelson Fairchild's realization in the midst of his long decline. ``I've made a world in which the men are sinister,'' he thinks, ``and the women completely opaque.'' To his own misfortune, so has Denis Johnson.

DENIS JOHNSON

From ``Already Dead''