Newsweek Looks at Noir

This is a bit old, from early August, so you might have seen this already. But if you missed it the first time (like me), be sure to check out Malcolm Jones’s examination of noir books in Newsweek.

Jones points out how noir is suddenly a hot genre, with respected authors writing about smoking guns and equally smoking dames. But, even the best literary heavyweights don’t always get it right in Jones’s view. somehow Johnson never gets it quite right. He feels Denis Johnson missed the mark with recent novel and “That’s surprising in a way, since any sentence of, say, Jesus’ Son, Johnson’s classic collection of short stories, is more genuinely noir than all of Nobody Move.