Omni Daily Crush: "Nobody Move"

How strange is it that, within a few months of each other this year, two of the most ambitious novelists around, each coming off a vast, long-in-the-works epic, have made the No Country for Old Men move, writing a lighter, more accessible genre piece that has gotten compared to Elmore Leonard? In May, Denis Johnson, fresh off the 720-page, National Book Award-winning (and beloved by me) Tree of Smoke, released Nobody Move (which I was too timid to keep up with when it was serialized earlier in Playboy). And in August comes the new Thomas Pynchon (a phrase that has in the past sent Godzilla-like shudders through the literary earth), Inherent Vice, complete with a Tim Dorsey-style cover after the more solemn packaging of his previous book, the ambivalently received thousand-pager, Against the Day.

I've just cracked the Pynchon, but so far I'm hearing more Tom Robbins than Leonard. Nobody Move, though? Well, it's a very good Elmore Leonard book--and that's a very good thing. Like Leonard, Johnson's so spare with the words that he often leaves off the subject of a sentence. Starts right in with the verb. And like Leonard, his bad guys (and they're all bad guys) manage to be both bumbling and ingenious, brutal and charming. And best of all, like Leonard, his banter crackles (and is a reminder of how sharp Johnson's dialogue is in anything he writes, whether it's an intricate, dreamy war drama or a lean little crime thriller). Here's the little bit I read out loud to my wife the other day, which made her put down Anna Karenina and pick this one up (and swallow it whole, laughing all the way). The two main bad guys--the ones you root for--are buying a change of clothes at a JCPenney:

    She changed into the pantsuit, gray pinstripe, and made sure she had her shoulders back and her smile on before she swept aside the curtain. "Does it fit?"
    He stared, and then he went for his Camels and put one between his lips, realized where he was, dropped the cigarette into his shopping bag. "It fits."
    "You're sweet," she said, and she sort of meant it. But not as a compliment. "You're homeless, right?"
    "I have a home. I'm just not going back there, is all."
    "So right in that shopping bag is everything you own."
    "Everything I need."
    "And your white canvas bag--what's in that one?"
    "Everything else I need."
    "I know what's in it. A sawed-off shotgun."
    He seemed completely unsurprised. "It's not a sawed-off. It's a pistol grip. And it isn't mine."
    "I peeked in the bag while you were in the shower."
    "You zipped it up real nice," he said. "Good for you."

And on it goes--it goes down easy. --Tom