Soul of a Whore describes several episodes in the life of one William Jennings Bryan Jenks, an iterant faith healer and convicted fraudster. The play picks up with Bill Jenks entering a Huntsville, Texas, Greyhound station. This establishment’s sole purpose seems to be ferrying recently paroled felons back to civilization in the form of Houston or Dallas. The characters hanging around this backwater bus terminal are completely madcap. There’s Marsha, a sassy striper; there’s a clerk, whose worldview is summed up by the maxim that “all human beings look like criminals,” and finally there’s an ambiguously Hispanic or Black felon nicknamed HT, which is short for “Hostage Taker.” In addition to the hijinks that one would expect from mixing together such premium cuts of humanity, there are two truly eerie events in the play’s opening act. The first is that John “JC” Cassandra, son of the soon-to-be-executed child-killer Bess Cassandra, walks into the station toting “a wooden cross taller than himself.” Oddly, this is only the second most spiritual event in the first half of the play. Surely the high point of religious weirdness occurs when Marsha is possessed by a demon. Bill Jenks is conscripted to perform an exorcism, which is awkward because he and the demon have actually met before. The faith healer agrees not to condemn the spirit to hell if the latter will reveal his fortune. The demon tells him that he will soon resurrect the dead, and shortly thereafter die. The rest of the play follows Jenks as he, Oedipus-like, tries to avoid his fate, but nevertheless stumbles inexorably toward it.

Denis Johnson

One would expect Purvis (a biographical play about a real-life FBI agent Melvin Purvis) to be more grounded than Soul of a Whore. That it is, but not by much. The play opens with Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover sitting in the Oval Office playing gin rummy and talking about how to negotiate with Mormons from outer space. In six additional scenes, the play proceeds backwards in time to 1934, when Purvis came very close to arresting John Dillinger and Lester Gillis, a.k.a. “Baby Face Nelson.” Of these later scenes, one takes place in “a fathomless void,” another in a South Carolina radio station, and two in rural Wisconsin. It turns out that the focus of the play is less on Melvin Purvis than it is on J. Edgar Hoover, who resented Purvis for his triumphs as an investigator. Hoover is portrayed as being far beyond the pale of right-wing extremist. He praises Adolph Hitler every chance he gets, and speaks in soliloquies about the virtues of state control: “My fondest vision is to map the hairs / And very capillaries of the least/ Significant citizen and begin a file. / To tongue and probe the grossness in the soul/ Of every enemy of the American dreams.”

In some sense, Soul of a Whore and Purvis share a common topic: the mythology of the self. Bill Jenks wants to flee the powers of healing, as their use inevitably seems to bring the return of his demon. In fact, he says that he has no real powers of healing, “all I have is a knack for crossing paths\with people just about to heal themselves.” Whereas Bill Jenks wants to run from illegitimate renown and heroic achievement, Purvis is largely indifferent to his deserved fame. Hoover tries to undermine the mythology around Purvis in nearly every scene. As he explains, “We want straight arrows, Boys scouts, true believers.\ What we can’t abide are vivid heroes. If a man should stand too high, well then,\ We’ll lop him at the legs. As I did to Purvis.” To my mind, it is hard to identify a definite conclusion that the two plays elucidate about personal mythology, not that there has to be one. If the works provoke reflection and entertain while doing so, then Denis Johnson has surely done his job. Of course, for some people the zaniness of these plays will simply baffle, or perhaps bore. Soul of a Whore and Purvis is likely to polarize readers in much the same way that his earlier work has. Which is itself somewhat ironic: the public reaction to Denis Johnson, his personal mythology, has shown a predictability that could not be more opposed to the character of his work. I can’t say for sure, but perhaps that’s the true lesson of these two plays: the image of a man and his reality agree but rarely.

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Nowhere fancy: I was in Asheville, North Carolina, facing nothing more uncomfortable than bugs and frogs and humidity, the steady chatter of fat people plunking themselves into the swimming pool outside. This luxe southern summer was a weird backdrop for Denis Johnson’s gnarly accounts of Africa and Idaho, but the book had fallen into my hand unwittingly, while I was scrambling out the door and looking for something to read on the plane. I lashed out at the shelf while the cab started honking, and Seek was what I came away with.

Seek. The title implies worlds of volition, but is there a less volitional writer alive than Denis Johnson? Windblown, drug-addled (whether actually so or more historically, within the provinces of his fiction, at least), prone to peopling his stories with coasting fuck-ups. Most of the people in Johnson’s work don’t seem to have much idea how they got there, whether “there” is a hospital or a Holiday Inn or a cell on death row. They don’t “seek” much. But boy do they ever find.

I love Johnson, sometimes. I love Angels, and about two-thirds of Jesus’ Son (the book as a totality, sure, but some of the individual stories are, in fact, weak), Resuscitation of A Hanged Man (because how could you not love a book that includes the sentence, “And on his ass the sad assassin sat”?) These are great books, but Johnson has certainly written some indifferent ones. Tree of Smoke seems to me pretty erratic, and The Name of The World strikes me as being outright bad. Then again, I like writers who are sometimes bad, and at the very least mistrust those who never are. It usually means they aren’t trying hard enough. Give me Philip Roth (intermittently quite lousy) over William Trevor any day of the week.

Seek is bookended with essays on Liberia. The first, “The Civil War in Hell,” describes Johnson’s presence in Monrovia in 1990, shortly after Prince Johnson’s forces had captured the president and sawn off his ears. The second, “The Small Boys Unit,” is some sort of minor masterpiece, a Heart of Darkness-like account of Johnson’s flailing attempts to profile Charles Taylor for the New Yorker in 1992. In between, there are accounts of visits to Christian biker rallies, Afghanistan, Somalia, Mormon compounds…in short, just about every place a sensible person (although, of course, Johnson is anything but “a sensible person”) would choose to avoid. If what you’re seeking is to be found in those places, it might be best to change your aims, anyway.

Except that’s the point. No one, I think, captures better certain kinds of ecstasy, a spastic transcendence, better than Johnson, and no one better describes the worlds we’d rather not be living in. Jesus’ Son has been talked to death, but I think Angels is arguably the better book. Beginning in a bus station and ending on death row, with a long stretch in the desert in between, Angels amounts to a guided tour of the most forsaken places on earth. (Where else does Johnson stage his fiction? ERs, abortion clinics…) Seek is the same. Conscientiously so, and with a more knowing—at least, more intentional—awareness of itself as such.

I found myself thinking, in my thoroughly stupid perambulations with the book (lugging a suitcase across a Ramada Inn parking lot, haggling with people at the Delta ticket counter), that just about everywhere is worth avoiding, that even the earth’s green places house more than their share of misery and boredom. Which is why Johnson’s book is thrilling. Not because it offers views of things us pampered first-worlders know not quite enough about (though it does, of course), but because, too, those views are so personal. Johnson’s haplessness, his strange—and most likely exaggerated—incompetence keeps clouding the frame. (Indeed, if he were this incompetent, he’d almost assuredly be dead, a fact of which he’s savvy enough to remind us.) “Friends who know me to be of weak character might be interested to learn I was once nearly saved from it,” a seemingly feather-light essay about Johnson’s childhood tenure in the Boy Scouts begins. That “weak character” is belied everywhere in the book, perhaps even by the things that also support it: by the steely hogging of psychedelics (“I said I’d split it, but I only gave him about a quarter. Less than a quarter. Yeah, I never quite became a hippie. And I’ll never stop being a junkie.”), in “Hippies,” and by Johnson’s fumbling-yet-persistent effort to bail out an arrested Nigerian student in “The Small Boys Unit.” His character gets in the way, but it’s the book’s real subject.

“My parents raised me to love all the earth’s peoples. Three days in this zone and I could only just manage to hold myself back from screaming N****rs! N****rs! N****rs! until one of these young men emptied a whole clip into me.”

I try to imagine what The New Yorker’s editors would’ve done with such a passage, had Johnson not opted instead to keep their expense money and never deliver his promised piece at all.

I’d describe Seek as “maddeningly erratic,” but it’s just this bifucation that kicks my ass: Johnson’s bravery and his cowardice, his clowning and, in something more slight like “The Lowest Bar in Montana,” his flat-footed efforts to please. His greatness comes from contradictions that can’t cancel one another out. He’s a hippie, sure, but there are right wing undertones all over. (Undertones? Heck, “The Militia in Me” and “Run, Rudolph, Run,” about abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph, suggest more robust sympathies.) It’s the chaos of his character, which is just about the only place anything interesting ever gets found, that makes this book happen. And by the time we get to “The Small Boys Unit,” and Johnson—arrested at the Ivory Coast’s border—collides with a wayward American missionary whose kindness seems purely pro forma, we understand what it is to be lost.

Green lizards crawled all over our feet while he prayed. Red-headed lizards ran by on two legs like Martians excited to be landed on our world. I wept, I snuffled. I was right to call myself confused.

Johnson’s Africa, even exoticized beyond its usual terrestrial limits, seems closer to a Delta Airlines ticket counter than to anything we can’t understand. It also seems non-navigable, impossible, and frightening beyond belief, even as the human faces he encounters there (a host of preposterous-seeming guides: Winston Holder, Lincoln Smythe, the indelible Augustus Shaacks…but also the velour-clad Charles Taylor) shine benignly. Such is hell, though, and such is the human scene. Such are the things we go looking for. They’re those very ones we can never leave behind.

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Dylan’s stories, written over five years, focus on mother-daughter relationships, coming-of-age sexuality, and the secret lives of girls on the verge of becoming women.

***

The Rumpus: I’d like to begin with the people who populate Normal People Don’t Live Like This. The characters you write about are mainly teenage girls and their mothers, all of whom exist in a space that is equal parts love and cruelty, truth and lies. And part of what makes this in-between world so convincing is your animation of your characters’ anxieties about existing in such a state. In “Fire,” this is particularly vivid with Leah’s enchantment and fear of Rainey Royal, a girl who teases her to the point of humiliation. And we also see this desire for acceptance in Leah’s mother, Helen, in “Normal People Don’t live Like This,” when she meets Bonita Prideau, a chaotic woman who in many ways is her opposite. How do you get close enough to your characters to reveal their vulnerabilities and nail these nuances?

Dylan Landis: Is nuance too slippery to actually nail? I find I have to sneak up on it, via many revisions.

Sneaking is better. I think nailing’s what you do for stereotypes, and stereotypes come first for me. I write the alluring bad girl, like Rainey, or the literary, over-permissive mom, Bonita, or the selfish molester Richard who pins Rainey down in the park when she’s thirteen.

Then I have to work the nails out, slowly, with this damned teaspoon that’s my metaphor for endless revision. (I promise I’ll explain the teaspoon.) What I mean is, during revision, I need another character to view the stereotyped person with nuance. You mentioned “Fire,” in which Rainey’s teasing gets so calculated and cold, Leah comes to believe she might get pushed off a roof.

But while I built up that nasty teasing and heightened Leah’s fear, I heard the hum of Leah’s desire. She wants to French-inhale like Rainey, she wants her jeans to fit like Rainey’s, and she kind of wants Rainey herself, though she doesn’t have a language for that. She would happily let Rainey push her around if Rainey would just like her. When you have feelings like dread and desire wrestling with each other, and you turn up the heat, something has to happen.

You can do this with any character. Rainey’s a bully, but her vulnerabilities come out in “Jazz,” where she’s pinned down by Richard, her father’s 39-year-old best friend. But Rainey’s not merely a victim. She’s only thirteen, but she loves that Richard loves and desires her. She likes to set fires and she likes to watch them burn. Richard is a fire way bigger than she can put out.

Rumpus: When I read the first story of your collection, “Jazz,” I knew you would take me to all kinds of lush places with your prose. You write with such lyricism and yet it does not ever subsume character or take over any other important aspects of craft:

“Through the ground, Rainey feels the crowd gathering, she feels blankets unfolding on the grass, she feels tuna-fish sandwiches nestling in wrinkled tin foil. She feels John Coltrane place his fingers on the soprano sax like it is her own spine. She feels how a concert swells before it starts and she wants to be there, she wants to lie on a blanket while Richard smells her toes and is driven insane, and she wants to feel the exact moment when the sound of the sax shimmies over the Transverse and toward the sky, change the course of the East River and starting every fountain in the city.”

How do you strike that balance? And how important is musicality and cadence to your writing on a sentence level?

Landis: Music is important to the characters. Cadence is crucial to the writing. Music in writing isn’t like salt in cooking. It’s not just there for flavor. It has to be inseparable from character, like dialogue. Just as no one should be able to say another person’s lines, each character needs his own musical DNA. Rainey lies to people that she plays jazz flute―in truth, she stumbles along with classical flute lessons. Her lying gave rise to a cadence that became the rhythmic spine of the story: It is true that…It is a lie that…

Musicality―what I’d call lyricism―that’s my voice, though it doesn’t come naturally. It arrives after a prolonged struggle. There’s as much cutting involved as there is writing.

Can I talk about the spoon now? The spoon was an art assignment we had in tenth grade, in public school. We had to form an egg from wet clay, and I remember digging this wet, elephant-colored clay out of a barrel with my fingers and fingernails. We had clay eggs hardening on the windowsill forever.

Then we brought in teaspoons from home, and every day for a week, for the entire art period, each student polished her gray clay egg with the back of her teaspoon. No talking, I’m sure. It was that kind of school.

By Friday, my egg looked like polished pewter. It was pretty, and shiny, but, I mean, why? Why would you polish a clay egg with a spoon for a week? This baffled me for twenty-five years. And then I began writing fiction.

Egg-polishing is how I get to lyricism. But it took me a while to grow up and grasp that lyricism means nothing without character, story and conflict. It has to be in their service.

Rumpus: As a follow up to that, I’d like to ask if we can now call revising egg-polishing? I like it as a replacement term.

Landis: Can I get royalties with that?

Rumpus: “Rana Fegrina,” is one of my favorite stories in the collection. In it, the shy and introspective Leah Levinson collides with Angeline Yost, the school “slut.” They work together on dissecting a frog, whose Latin name is Rana Fegrina. At this point the story rises to biblical levels. Can you speak a little about this story and how it took shape?

Landis: Backward. It launched backward. You’d think it would start with the idea of a frog dissection, wouldn’t you? Instead, I was trying to write Leah into English class the day after she’s jabbed Rainey in the eye with a key. This opening bored me for weeks, till one morning The New York Times ran an article on a fantastic book called Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation, by Leora Tannenbaum. Apparently every school designates one girl to be the “slut,” not because she’s doing the football team or even having sex at all, but as a punishment. Maybe she dated someone’s boyfriend. Maybe she doesn’t conform to what’s “normal.”

That day I couldn’t get to my computer fast enough. My high school had a reputed “slut,” and thank God I didn’t know her―we had 3,200 kids―so I was free to make up Angeline Yost. And, baby, Angeline Yost does not conform.

So now I had two opposing chicks on a collision course to the bio lab. I had a crucible―the close, smelly quarters of the lab table, over which these two people must collaborate over a creepy task.

I opened with a litany on Angeline, partly to list what I knew about her, and partly to create conflict: What’s true? How could it possibly be true? How much could I reveal about this girl through rumor and her social circle and her fingernails? By the time I got back to English class, two things were happening at once―and that’s always useful for the writer. (For a great example read the first story in Robin Black’s If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This.) Leah was worrying about Angeline’s rampant sexuality and toughness. And she was also listening to her teacher read Whitman, who is very spiritual.

Researching the frog got pretty spiritual too. If you’re in the right frame of mind, looking at a splayed frog will make you think about the beauty of our internal architecture, and the need to stop and marvel. Maybe you’ll think, this frog died so I might learn. Seriously. I studied frog anatomy till each organ, like that heart with its one-way valves, practically sang, till weird things began linking up: the father, Rana Fegrina, Christ in Gethsemane not wanting to die (insert here: author is Jewish), Leah’s inchoate longing for her father to find an afterlife and her own longing to live.

So they crucify the frog. It’s true. They pin the hands and the feet. That’s about when things got really olfactory: frog smells, hospital smells, body odor, the odors of Whitman’s poetry. All those perfumes were connecting Leah to life while she was being forced to relinquish her father.

Readers like Jim Krusoe and Mary Otis encouraged me to keep adding and subtracting things and revise like crazy. The story accrued layers, as Andrea Barrett puts it, for a long time.

Rumpus: Bigger picture now. Linked collections require that a story work well on their own as well as take part in the arc of a larger work. Images must echo, motifs appear and reappear, and the characters must continue to build and complicate. No easy task. What was your process for developing your collection, and did you see it as a linked collection from the start? And, part two: what were the difficulties in writing a linked collection, and what ways did it set you free?

Landis: Linking wasn’t hard because I was so dumb―I had no idea how intricately stories could be linked. And I had no process. I wrote a story and then I wrote another set in the same neighborhood. All I knew was that Flannery O’Connor said grace must be offered at some point in a story, often triggered by an act of violence. Which is why, for an AWP panel on linked stories, I dissected Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and talked about that instead of preaching from my own work. Love Medicine is a truly brilliant work of linkage. Some of my notes on that are here, on a blog that raises its head about twice a year.

Linking set me free in this regard: I didn’t have to come up with a new set of unrelated characters for each story. How do writers do that? I can only hold a few people in my head at a time.

My model―can I say goddess?― might be Andrea Barrett. Her stories and novels―the historic ones―are linked across decades, centuries, sometimes in ways that seem as minor and sweet as grace notes, and sometimes in ways that stop your heart and make you want to grab perfect strangers and cry, “Nora found her brother! In an entirely different book!” Erdrich too, if we are talking across many books and I am allowed multiple goddesses.

For single linked collections I go back to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Harriet Doerr’s Stones for Ibarra, and I’m excited about Elissa Schappell’s new linked collection, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, because her last one, Use Me, had these loose, dazzling links that made you want to rush out and try the form.

Rumpus: I love how certain points of view in your book don’t overwhelm the other ones (and the relationship I’m thinking about mainly is Helen and her daughter Leah), but rather they speak to each other. Is this something you consciously thought about when you were creating a linked collection?

Landis: Consciously thought about―oh, no. I was just learning how to write stories, assigning myself one challenge at a time. Try first person, present tense. Okay! Now try first person, past tense. Try third person! Try Leah’s mom’s point of view! It kept things exciting, and moving, and I loved building one small world of a few square blocks, as opposed to, say, Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam, which would have terrified me. (Try writing a man!) In the end I transposed as much as possible into the same key: third person, past tense.

I never considered, a la Erdrich: “What might link the stories more powerfully? What might heighten the narrative arc, besides Leah getting older? Should links ripen each time they crop up?

I was reading some great examples of the form, but not close-reading. I’ve since taught myself to do that, to suck the juice from the stone. I teach a seminar on close-reading now.

Rumpus: Do you feel that linked collections need to be held together by a particular place or one central character, like Leah, in your collection?

Landis: To paraphrase Denis Johnson: What words can be uttered about Jesus’ Son?

It’s held together by place and a central character, but if Fuckhead were never in the same place twice, what power could possibly be lost? If none, is it because voice is the central link? Voice, violence and the movement of grace? Do the links between stories―like the Vine, where people nod out and drink, or Fuckhead’s $65 car with just an emergency brake―strengthen and deepen each time they reappear, or is every link perfect the first time and in need of no more freight the second? Is there a narrative arc? I haven’t figured that book out yet, but I just listened to it on tape―it makes each story and each link feel new.

Rumpus: I’ve spoken a lot about what your collection means to readers, and the many ways it has spoken to me. What does the collection mean to you?

Landis: This may disappoint you, but what it means to me is this: I did it. I did this one thing. I wrote and published a book of fiction! And it seemed so improbable. I started writing fiction at forty with no English degree. I didn’t even know how to read properly. My best friend just got a contract for a gorgeous debut novel that took her eleven years to write. It can be done, if you, personally, have an urgent need to do it more than you need to do anything else. That’s what my collection means to me. That’s my private evangelism.

Rumpus: What writers do you consider your teachers? Who do you return to over and over again?

Landis: The teacher-writers I go back to are what Jim Krusoe calls translucent, meaning you can see and study the watchworks inside their books. Read the first chapter―it’s two and a half pages―of Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. In my close-reading seminar we spend two hours on those pages. You can see how the first two lines are sprung rhythym, that natural, conversational rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry―and how that pulls you in, and then there’s a shock at the end of the first sentence that fastens you to the page. Woodrell shows you precisely where and how tension is ratcheted up, and how concrete details anchor moments of revelation or decision. He will teach you a dozen ways to reveal character, and the meaning of the word crucible.

Stones for Ibarra, by Harriet Doerr, teaches me every time how to treat place as a living thing. Landscape never sits there in a Doerr story. Her Mexico is a force. Characters resist it, drill through it, divine it, drown in it, and learn it through strange misunderstandings.

As I Lay Dying by Faulkner and, at the other extreme, Bee Season, Myla Goldberg’s first novel, and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace are books I’ve dismantled over several readings to parse how different points of view or ways of structuring can reveal different brands of truth.

In stories―and this is a short list by necessity―I’ve gone back many times to Mona Simpson’s “Lawns,” Kate Braverman’s “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta,” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” They’re all in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. I wear that collection out.

But some books are so complex, I just drink from them a lot―I’m not good enough yet to be their student. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison; Portrait of The Artist, by Joyce; Angels, by Denis Johnson; everything by Edward P. Jones; and most of Cormac McCarthy―Blood Meridien if I had to choose. Even my goddess, Andrea Barrett: not so translucent.

Rumpus: Can you tell us about what you are working on now?

Landis: No. And you can’t dig it out of me with that spoon. I talked about one novel-in-progress too much, and now all these dear, well-meaning people keep asking cheerfully, “How’s that Big Fat Novel of Yours going?” till the pages glared at me and I put them in a closet. For now. Just for now. Trust me. I’m working.

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Denis Johnson strips bare and shucks the pump in his fast-moving literary noir, Nobody Move.

Over the past several years we have witnessed the revival of a uniquely American form: the literary crime novel. Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men reminded readers of many things, chief among them that when you introduce the elements of outsized profits and men doing whatever it takes to procure them, stories take on an entirely different tension and even greater urgency. The heightened stakes in this kind of book are always the stakes of life and death.

And, of course, money.

Critics are already comparing Denis Johnson’s latest addition to the genre, Nobody Move (serialized last fall in Playboy), to literary forbears Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett—and these aren’t bad comparisons by any means. They just aren’t necessarily the best ones. The movement of Johnson’s sleek, sexy, often hilarious noir novel owes much more to McCarthy’s, as do several of Johnson’s plot details. No Country for Old Men features an illicit $2.4 million payday; in Nobody Move, $2.3 million is the figure. In No Country, evil guy (Anton Chigurh) pursues bad guy (Llewellyn Moss), gets shot in the leg and nurses himself back to health; Nobody Move’s bag guy (Jimmy Luntz) leg-shoots his novel’s evil guy (Ernest Gambol), who must be nursed by a woman who soon becomes a love interest. (Evil guys don’t generally get to have love interests; it’s nice to see that Johnson’s does.)

But Nobody Move is far from being derivative—rather, I see this as an example of the best kind of literary cross-pollination. I also see it as an interesting dynamic in which our best living writer influences, perhaps in ways entirely unconscious, our soon-to-be best living writer.

At the center of Johnson’s novel is the terminally sympathetic Luntz, member of a barbershop choir, a schlemiel, human yo-yo, and gambling addict. Early on, Luntz is intercepted by Gambol, henchman of a crime boss named Juarez, to whom Luntz owes his gambling debts. After Luntz’s initial escape from Gambol, he meets Anita Desilvera, a femme fatale who’s been framed by her husband for embezzlement. Luntz and Desilvera end up in bed quickly (but believably) and then together they flee Gambol and Juarez, who now seek a gruesome revenge on anti-hero Luntz: they plan to eat his testicles, a retributive delicacy they’ve indulged in before with other deadbeats. The couple’s intentions eventually escalate from simple escape to stealing the $2.3 million Desilvera’s husband embezzled and framed her for.

Denis Johnson

That’s all I’m willing to give away concerning the plot, whose tense twists and turns are unexpected and entirely satisfying—but plot, in this novel, is secondary to style, dialogue, and the classic Denis Johnson sentence: “After the film it was raining, a light, steady rain. Ruthless neon on the wet streets like busted candy.” The truly amazing thing about Johnson’s prose is that it doesn’t let up, and he continues to stack great sentence upon great sentence, each image clear and surprising, each phrase delivered with a poet’s care. This is also true of 2007’s Tree of Smoke, for which he was awarded the National Book Award, and while the prose there is maximalist and recursive, the prose in Nobody Move is minimalist and built for speed. And yet, it’s no less impressive. Readers looking for quick and entertaining will find it here; those who want to ponder and dig beneath the surface are certain to unearth treasures to amaze.

But what finally strikes me about Nobody Move is the way Johnson takes the form revived by McCarthy and does something quite different in terms of atmosphere and tone, in terms of sex. No Country is bleakly apocalyptic, describing a desexualized world in which societal structures inevitably break down and fail. Nobody Move depicts an apocalypse that is smaller, personal, and thoroughly erotic, a vortex involving a handful of excessively libidinous characters. And, as is always the case with literary crime, we find ourselves, much like Luntz, placing bets on who will make it out alive, and on what they’ll make it out with.

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Joon, the 13-year-old runaway at the center of Miles from Nowhere, could use some good advice, and early in the story, she gets some from a tough-talking girl in a youth shelter cafeteria: “Life’s only as bad as you make it out to be. It’s got nothing to do with the way it is.”

That philosophy is put to the test on nearly every page of Nami Mun’s debut novel. Set in New York City in the 1980s, the story opens shortly after Joon’s father abandons the family once and for all. “He had given up on us. On my mother’s ways. She was getting up in the middle of the night and stepping out onto our cold, muddy yard to dig a hole in the ground, as if trying to tunnel her way back to Korea.”

After months begging her despondent mother to speak just one word, Joon takes to the streets in a futile effort to find her father. The resulting survival tale is wrenching on nearly every page. “In order to get what I needed—shelter, food, money, friendship—parts of me, piece by piece, would have to be sacrificed,” Joon tells us. She earns fifteen cents a minute as a sex worker, shoots drugs in abandoned apartments, and, on better days, sells used newspapers on the train. “Sometimes people handed money over without even taking a page, maybe thinking their donation would keep their kids from turning out like me.”

Structured as a novel-in-stories, Miles from Nowhere narrates several years of Joon’s life with compassion and humor, introducing readers to memorable, sharply drawn secondary characters she encounters on the streets. There’s Wink, a young man who struts around the youth shelter looking, in his Members Only jacket, like “the president of money,” only to later troll the subway looking for tricks. There’s Marilyn, a Latina sex worker with more free advice: “The first day’s the hardest. That’s cuz you got all that crap in your brains about right and wrong and shit.”

Nami Mun

Mun writes with the acuity of a miniaturist, yet her attention to detail never comes at the expense of momentum. “At night I used to take the ferry back and forth from the city to Staten Island. I’d watch the diamond lights smearing the wet window glass or stand out on the windy deck as the regulars sat crooked, drinking their pints and shouting about different kinds of loss.” In a style reminiscent of Denis Johnson, Mun’s prose is clear, lyrical, and punctuated by breathtaking figurative language. “I stood on the railing and let the wind sting my eyes and tickle my veins where a warm drug bubbled through, heating up like the wires of an electric blanket. I was sixteen and pregnant, then, thinking that the ups and downs of the East River would kill it somehow.”

Like Johnson, Mun resists the most common pitfalls of writing about addiction and destitution. Neither a sensationalistic shock tour, nor a heartwarming recovery tale, Miles from Nowhere is about loneliness, and the fleeting moments of hope with which Joon tries to sustain herself. “I wasn’t the best salesgirl but I liked the job,” she says, when she lands a gig selling Avon. “I liked being inside people’s homes because there I wasn’t pregnant, I wasn’t a runaway, I wasn’t using. With the makeup on I became a new version of me.”

The New York that Joon inhabits is brought to life with just enough cultural references (Billy Dee Williams, anyone?) to place readers firmly in the era, without adorning scenes with gratuitous detail. It’s a city too big to notice the tragic lives and lost innocence of its inhabitants. Come to this novel for the gripping story of a teenage runaway, stay for the transcendent language—Nami Mun’s debut shows not only how lives are eviscerated, but how they can be rebuilt.

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