If I had the text of Denis Johnson's The Laughing
Monsters in searchable format, I might confirm my guess
about which telling words show up most often: my money is on
truth and liar. Followed closely, in third place, by
friend. Or maybe dark. Or camouflage. In
Johnson's world, all of them are inextricably, and uneasily, bound.
In this terse, elliptical literary thriller -- so classified by the author
himself -- Johnson returns to the territory expansively and
devastatingly explored in his 2007 National Book Award winner,
Tree of Smoke: the lies men tell, and their usually
exorbitant cost. The overt price is paid in lives, when the
professionally underhanded are employed by security services to
trade in vital information. The more insidious bill is presented to
the soul. The story of Roland Nair, a classic thrill junkie whose
loyalties (to America, Denmark, NATO, and more than one
woman) are in dangerous flux, is on one level about intel.
Gathering it, guarding it, buying and selling it: the latest in
technological adventure. On another level -- and there's always an
unlit basement in the works of Denis Johnson, one of the most
astute commentators on corruption in general, putatively
upstanding America's two-faced brand of it in particular -- it is
about how shockingly easy it is to hide whole chunks of one's
character. Those would be the very darkest parts. There are no
unalloyed heroes in his writings. Though at first it seems offhand
detail, a bit of character color, the fact that his protagonists often
engage in misogynistic behavior is not unimportant. It is a direct
hit on the idea that what we do is far more important than what we
say.
What we say is rarely to be trusted. Or so narrator Nair discovers,
and he himself manifests, when he returns to Africa on a mission
to inform on an old friend and colleague who has gone AWOL
from a special forces unit in Congo. (An event identifies the year
as 2012, though it is otherwise unnamed.) Michael Andriko is an
operative who was trained in the U.S., but it is suggested he also
spent some loyalty on Mossad as well as on Kuwait, since in the
line of work he shares with his pursuer/friend, loyalty is like a
paycheck, it comes and it goes. A decade earlier he worked
undercover in Afghanistan, where he saved Nair's life. Not that
that necessarily means anything. These men, whose most essential
training consists of learning to mistrust anyone and everyone,
move fluidly across all borders, including those of morality. They
swim through a subterranean network that exists far beneath the
surface upon which the rest of us float, unknowing -- a sort of
cave-diving both exhilarating and perilous.
The men journey together and separately from Sierra Leone to the
mountainous region between Uganda and Congo -- Adriko's
homeland, in common with Idi Amin Dada -- variously doubting
each other, needing each other, doing nefarious business together,
and contemplating betrayals. On Nair's part, this last includes the
personal kind, a more than friendly interest in his friend's beautiful
American fiancée.
The leanness of the novel is one of its gratifications: Johnson, who
is also a poet, has an almost freakish ability to write in
abbreviations that are at once casually suggestive and as specific as
an exit wound. Not just red jogging shoes worn with yellow socks:
they are clean red jogging shoes. The background music of
the book is drinking, voluptuously rendered -- Johnson admits to
once being an alcoholic, and his father worked for the State
Department, so the author comes by his context honestly. His
writing skill is all his own. The way he wields the many carefully
controlled digressions that at first seem no more than the literary
equivalent of shading for three-dimensional effect is a case in
point. He permits himself no extraneity or self-indulgence. Even
the substance of a Guinness commercial on TV, given the better
part of a paragraph, will prove central to the novel's essential
meaning. They were never digressions at all. Exegesis of this
packed work could easily keep a graduate English class busy for
half a term.
Still, The Laughing Monsters yields an almost molecular
pleasure in the sense that we are encountering places and people so
convincingly oddball it seems they couldn't be made up by a
writer. Could they? The narrator has the kind of skewed sensibility
that causes him to observe in an email the fact that he is seated at a
table eating chicken while live chickens wander around his feet.
Immersing us in an alternative world possessing such clarity it
swiftly sidelines our own, Johnson exemplifies a prime reason we
read at all in the first place. (His short story collection, Jesus' Son,
was for many a life-changing book.) In the new novel he
continues to refine a virtuoso ability to capture, for one thing, the
alienness of foreign lands. (A Johnsonian signature is the use of
dislocating brand names that simultaneously lend authenticity and
inject irony: Good Life butter biscuits, consumed on a decrepit bus
populated with those who enjoy anything but a good life; Splendid
Driving School, which seems to specialize in idiotic accidents; the
National Pride Suites, no further comment needed; the Happy
Mountains of Adriko's warlike clan, ditto.) By extension he alludes
to a more profound thematic alienation, the fact that these men are
foreigners in the foreign land of their own integrity.
By choosing first-person narration, Johnson chooses what feels
like the voice of truth: most of us don't bother to fabricate artistic
lies for an audience of one. But one character's pointed question --
"How can I believe anything you say, when you're a liar?" --
becomes the novel's sardonic question to all. Searching for the
answer takes one to the vertiginous place he calls "the abyss."
There, "Many people keep watch. Nobody sees. . . . NATO, the
UN, the UK, the US -- poker-faced, soft-spoken bureaucratic
pandemonium. They're mad, they're blind, they're heedless, and not
one of them cares, not one of them." He describes not just the
black depths of international politics. This is the abyss of human
nature.
Only occasionally does a clean bright light illuminate Johnson's
real goal: not only a well-crafted genre thriller but a muscular
protest against nationalist criminality on the global stage. Such a
light falls on one explanatory statement. "Since nine-eleven,
chasing myths and fairy tales has turned into a serious business. An
industry. A lucrative one." In a book that turns upon the actions of
professional liars, alas, truer words were never spoken.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of three works of
nonfiction: The Perfect Vehicle, Dark Horses and Black Beauties,
andThe Place You Love Is Gone, all from Norton. She is writing
a book on B. F. Skinner and the ethics of dog training.
Reviewer: Melissa Holbrook Pierson
