Scary Society From the Ashes of the ‘60s

Denis Johnson is a psychedelic writer, a trippy Raymond Carver with a serious advantage over the maestro of gloom: a sense of humor. Maybe he’s another generation, spiritually if not physically, from Carver--the generation that learned the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate, rather than the lessons of the Depression and World War II. Maybe his tribe fought authority with flower power and alternative lifestyles, instead of suburban retreat and alcoholism.

There’s another thing to like about Denis Johnson--whose most recent fiction, “Jesus’ Son,” earned him a kind of cult status--like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, he gets into the heads of men (no mean feat: Like marriage counseling, it sometimes seems as though fiction spends more time in the heads of its women).

Johnson’s men are on the lam from civilization; they are romantic, idealistic, frightened, vulnerable men who fall into the same traps of self-mythologizing as Richard Ford’s and Jack Kerouac’s and even Thomas Pynchon’s male characters. It doesn’t mean that these men treat their women any better or that they aren’t self-important and self-obsessed. It’s just that they, like their author, have a sense of humor, which means an awareness of their failings, a delightful bonus dimension in this book especially. There is hope for the world in the fiction of Denis Johnson.

“Already Dead” is set in Northern California, in the infamous Humboldt County, a community of people who “had stayed hidden since 1975, when they’d finally succeeded in getting America to lose in Vietnam . . . about 30 dinosaur hipsters who appeared to have gathered in protest of the president’s policies, policies of which they had no understanding whatsoever.”

Carl Van Ness, a sort of Gen X Chauncy Gardner, a man who thinks of himself as “already dead,” is passing through in the hopes of committing suicide. He visits his old friend, Wilhelm Frankheimer, a beautiful giant of a man, a blacksmith just chock-full of epiphanies (“He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings. . . .”) and badly in need of rehab.

Many women make themselves available to Frankheimer (the women in this book are, with one exception, all badly dressed, if beautiful, hippies), but he is in love with Yvonne who, though there is no shortage of flat-out killers in “Already Dead,” is the character who scares me the most. She’s a self-proclaimed witch / channeler / healer, who unfortunately seems to have some talent in each of these professions and a finger in the lives of each of the characters (“Your twin,” she tells Carl Van Ness, in a moment of undeniable wisdom, “makes a basic error in mistaking the self for the universe. We all use the self as the basic referent. He fails to use any other.”)

Melissa, who is nothing but a waif, also makes herself available to Frankheimer, though she hangs mostly with Nelson Fairchild, a trust-fund kid whose wealthy father owns 10,000 acres of Northern California, among other things. Nelson is married to Winona whom he inexplicably hates with a white-hot passion so intense that he fantasizes her death about 60 times a day. Of course, it’s a love-hate kind of thing, which turns out to be a problem after he tries to have her killed. Nelson grows the obligatory marijuana for a living with a very shady partner, Clarence Meadows (a straightforward psychopath with no obvious motivations for killing). Nelson’s brother, Billy, who lives alone and isolated (thank God) in a little cabin, is most certainly based on the Unabomber.

This is probably already more than you can handle right now, but there’s much, much more. The good guys in this book (although Johnson reveals a whiff every so often of Wallace Stegnerian nonjudgmentalness) are cops! Can you believe it? Navarro, the town policeman / detective on duty, is such a good guy (until . . . ) that, as a reader, you cling to him irrationally and to his normal girlfriend Mo. They eat in diners.

In fact, after reading “Already Dead,” you may be glad that these people are happy in Humboldt County. Their world, without authority, morality (tested, questioned or not) is not only scary, it’s hard on the one or two children who make brief but excruciating appearances in this novel. “Did you think we were just thinking,” Van Ness says to Frankheimer, trying to lure him back to the good old days. “Thinking forbidden thoughts? Imagining heresies? Pretending to recognize moral systems as instruments of oppression and control?” Unfortunately, the world they created from the ashes of the old, at least in Denis Johnson’s little universe, owes a lot more to the principles of Nietzsche and Hitler than it does to E.F. Schumacher and Scott Nearing.

Yikes, I’ll take parking tickets, diner food and a two-car garage any day.