Alaska Employment Law

Is Playboy so old and forlorn that no one even remembers the joke about reading it for the articles? I didn’t see the four issues, starting last summer, that serialized Denis Johnson’s new novella, Nobody Move. I guess that’s no surprise — I haven’t looked at an issue of Playboy in  … decades? How is Mr. Hefner doing? Is he well?

Anyway, Mr. Johnson, the recent winner of the National Book Award (for the superb Tree of Smoke, which I raved about on another occasion), has written Nobody Move in the manner of Dickens, 10,000 words an installment, get it done, hey put it out in Playboy. I never noticed it until it came out as a real live book, which I snapped up, because Mr. Johnson is so good at smart dialog. Our hero, sort of, is Jimmy Luntz, a small-time hood and gambler in Bakersfield, in hock to a guy named Juarez, who sends out his enforcer, Gambol, in a big white Cadillac in order to impart to Jimmy a message about the importance of timely debt reduction. That doesn’t go so well for Gambol, who gets some tea and sympathetic help from a nurse, a favorite of Juarez. Jimmy meets Anita Desilvera, lately divorced, sexy, alcoholic, and convicted of embezzlement (worse, without actually having embezzled anything). But Anita has a plan, and she makes Jimmy an unwitting part of it, for a while anyway. Everyone meets in the end, many shots are fired, not everyone goes home. This is a bleak and highly entertaining little piece of noir. I made myself not read it in one sitting, because I knew how much fun it would be. And it was a lot of fun. Recommended.