'Laughing Monsters' a twist on espionage caper
Denis Johnson is the great hermit crab of American novelists, crawling inside a castoff shell and dragging it with him for a while before outgrowing it and moving on to a new one. In recent years these migrations have found him camping inside the Gothic (Already Dead), the Vietnam war novel (the National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke), the Western (Train Dreams) and classic noir (Nobody Move).
To each new habitat, Johnson brings his signature thematic and stylistic furniture: spare prose punctuated with occasional lyrical outbursts; dark humor that ranges from the hysterical to the despairing to the nihilistic; and an impulse to define and celebrate the human comedy in all its appallingly delicious forms. He doesn't so much subvert the genres he borrows as bend them to his will, consistently delivering nasty, nimble page-turners that double as high modernist literature.
In his new novel, The Laughing Monsters, Johnson makes a crisp and credible foray into Graham Greene territory, investing the international espionage caper with some post-9/11 twists and all his customary satirical and existential baggage.
It's the tale of Roland Nair, a NATO operative with dubious ethics, a taste for alcohol and prostitutes, and American and Danish passports. He shares a shady past with Michael Andriko, a African soldier of fortune who has lured his old friend to Sierra Leone on a perilous adventure that features guest appearances by, among others, British intelligence agents, Russian pilots, the Congolese Army, a Special Forces unit and an insane Ugandan priestess named La Dolce.
Pathologically secretive and haunted by his war-orphan past that dates back to the reprisals after the fall of Idi Amin, Andriko has cooked up a get-rich-quick scheme that may or not involve a cache of enriched uranium. In what may be a related side trip, he also wants to marry his fiancee, a beautiful African-American woman named Davidia St. Claire, in his ancestral village.
Nair is running his own corrupt racket — a plan to sell secret NATO documents — and gradually falling in love with Davidia, even as he oscillates between his admiration for and hatred of Andriko.
The plot, as is often the case in Johnson's novels, is at once legitimately suspenseful and ultimately irrelevant. What matters to Johnson (and therefore to us), as Michael and Roland careen from one crisis to another, is the continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of their relationship.
They are each other's soulmates, really, despite their quasi-sibling rivalry and their covert competition for the affections of the lovely and only semi-clueless Davidia. They share histories and hungers — for money and sex and love, of course, but also for truth, for a dependable sense of self in an arena of lies, disguises and shifting loyalties.
To term that sort of truth in Johnson's world as "elusive" would be both an understatement and, in its own way, a lie. In the end, Roland and Michael do achieve new levels of knowledge and acceptance, of themselves and each other.
With his usual alchemy, Johnson locates in the fetid moral swamp that is The Laughing Monsters a kind of grace, if not a redemption. This world is fallen, cynical, even vicious. But not all is lost.
The Laughing Monsters
By Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 228 pp.
3 1/2 stars out of four