CALIFORNIA BAD DREAMING

By Paul Gray

Denis Johnson, the author of four previous novels and three volumes of poetry, has earned an impressive string of literary awards and fellowships, not to mention a circle of devoted readers. But the big commercial blockbuster that all writers, no matter how pure and literary, dream about has so far eluded him. Already Dead (HarperCollins; 435 pages; $25) looks very much like Johnson's bid to hit the charts, with a bullet. Subtitled A California Gothic, a phrase that some may find redundant, this new novel offers just about everything that thriller buyers look for: drugs, booze, sex, murderous violence, a soupcon of the supernatural and a large cast of enterprising psychopaths.

Nelson Fairchild Jr. is by no means the scariest of these, but he has the problems--and dreams up the solutions--that set a very complicated plot into irreversible overdrive. The alcoholic son of a Northern California land baron, Nelson wants to leave his wife Winona but cannot without impoverishing himself. His tyrannical (and Roman Catholic) father has given Winona title to the house and property as a means of discouraging divorce. But Nelson needs money fast; he chickened out of a cocaine-smuggling scheme in the Rome airport, and now owes an irate druglord back home nearly $100,000. Two men in a camper have already arrived in Mendocino County, inquiring after Nelson's whereabouts. The marijuana plants that he and his partner, Clarence Meadows, are cultivating in a remote canyon on his father's land will more than settle this debt when harvested and sold, but Nelson fears Clarence almost as much as he does the big-time dealer.

"I owe a vast sum of money," Nelson calculates. "My wife's insurance would take care of that if she died." He says this to Carl Van Ness, a stranger he has just rescued from a drowning-suicide attempt in a pond near his wife's house. Here, Nelson believes, is an answered prayer. Since Van Ness seems intent on killing himself--because he believes himself, for reasons unclear, already dead--why would he mind taking out Winona before completing the job on himself?

"I'll do it. Sure," Van Ness answers when asked. That response, of course, is only the beginning of a story that quickly spins out of Nelson's and, eventually, everyone else's control, except for the author's, who narrates this trajectory of calamities with noteworthy energy and skill. And Johnson is obviously aiming for something more here than standard-issue pulp-fiction chills. In their reflective moments his whacked-out villains have a tendency to quote Nietzsche, as if to explain themselves to themselves and the reader. But Johnson does not make clear where, among so many burned-out characters, the reader's rooting interests should lie. Nelson seems a poor choice, even though he gets to tell major swatches of his story and is given some funny lines. Here is his take on California talk: "Everything on the spectrum of undesirability, from minor annoyance to universal tragedy, is okay. Anything better to any degree, all the way up to a colossal lottery jackpot or the return of Jesus--that's neat."

By this standard, a lot of this novel is neat. But a touch of what passes for normal behavior might have set all the madness in a more convincing context. As it stands, nearly everyone in Already Dead seems, well, already dead.

--By Paul Gray