"Hot on the heels of his National Book Award-winning novel, Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson—by far one of our best writers—has written what might seem like a side step: a short, tight crime noir, produced under deadline as a serial for Playboy magazine. Like so many contemporary crime narratives (Pulp Fiction comes instantly to mind), Johnson’s new novel, Nobody Move, keeps a narrow focus, homing in on the plight of Jimmy Luntz, a barbershop chorus singer, compulsive gambler and Steve Buscemi type who owes money to a guy named Ernest Gambol, who collects for a guy—a dealer of some sort—named Juarez . . . To give much more of the plot away would be to betray this hugely enjoyable, fast-moving novel . . . One senses that Johnson took great pleasure in writing on a deadline, keeping the story tight to the bone, honing his sentences down to the same kind of utilitarian purity he demonstrated in Tree of Smoke. His descriptive passages—and they are few and far between—show his poetic mastery . . . Johnson is one of the last of the hard-core American realist writers, working—in his own way—along a line that might be charted from Melville and Stephen Crane, with a detour through Flannery O’Connor and Don DeLillo. He routinely explores the nature of crime—all his novels have it in one form or an­other—in relation to the nature of grace (yes, grace) and the wider historical and cosmic order. So how does Nobody Move fit into his oeuvre? As Susan Sontag might say, it seems to operate as a flight from interpretation, settling into the genre for a ride, looking away from the wider implications of the world to enjoy itself by unfolding action within a neatly closed universe. But something more is at hand, because Johnson is a great writer, and even a casual entertainment, written well, has meaning. If Tree of Smoke—intricately plotted, embracing the entire Vietnam era and bringing it up alongside the war in Iraq—was a huge piece of work, a Guernica of sorts, then Nobody Move is a Warhol soup can, a flinty, bright piece of pop art meant to be instantly understood and enjoyed. It opens with the line 'Jimmy Luntz had never been to war,' and it closes with two characters near a river. All of its symbols—if you want to take a shot at finding deeper meaning—are in your face and seem to be saying, at least to me, that for the most part, most of us live within the status quo, one way or another, just trying to locate the next move."—David Means, The New York Times Book Review

"So noir it’s almost pitch-black, this follow-up to Johnson’s National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke concerns a lovable loser named Luntz—barbershop-chorus member, Hawaiian-shirt wearer, and inveterate gambler—who is in debt to an underworld bad guy. 'My idea of a health trip is switching to menthols and getting a tan,' he tells Anita Desilvera, a beautiful Native American woman whom he beds after a boozy night out, and who has bad guys of her own to escape. Against a desolate Western background of shantytowns and trailer parks, the pair’s story plays out largely according to the genre’s dictates, with wisecrack-laden dialogue and evenly dispersed cliffhangers that are a legacy of the work’s genesis as a serialization in Playboy. But there are also moments of arresting lyrical beauty—a river’s swollen surface under a crescent moon 'resembled the unquiet belly of a living thing you could step onto and walk across.'"—The New Yorker

"Jimmy Luntz has got to be the first protagonist in noir history to begin his blood-soaked descent singing in a men's choir. Jimmy's pipes are only the first clue that Nobody Move isn't your run-of-the-mill, bullet-hole-jacketed crime novel. Instead, this fast, funny diversion is protean writer Denis Johnson's sly follow-up to his Vietnam epic Tree of Smoke, winner of the 2007 National Book Award. It can be dicey for a literary lion to wander into the crime genre. Adhere to form and the author risks condescending or producing a faint copy of something disposable; subvert those conventions and the result is often flat, a thriller with no thrills. As if that balance weren't tricky enough, Johnson chose to write Nobody Move as a four-part serial for Playboy magazine. Well, as his Iraq War-distracted characters might say: Mission accomplished. Nobody Move does exactly what noir should do—propel the reader downhill, with its cast of losers, louts, and toughs as they cheat, shoot, and exploit one another into fast-talking oblivion. Yet there's a playful tilt, a humane rendering of its dark characters, and a relentless buzz in the sentences that recalls Jesus' Son, Johnson's tight little classic of fractured junkie transcendence. Johnson's smartest move is to avoid the overplotting that infects many contemporary