Denis Johnson (1949–2017)

An out-and-out knockout. This one's a short read, but after I finished the first story I knew that I wanted to take my time with it. Oddly enough, I kept thinking of Raymond Carver while I read this one. I'm not a Carver fan: his stuff is too neatly arranged, too focused on loneliness, and too spare for my tastes. But Johnson's got Carver's knack for imbuing life's most ordinary moments with extraordinary significance. Of course, Carver focused almost exclusively on the straight crowd, while show more Johnson's broadcasting from another America altogether, one that's filled with junkies, drifters, and down-and-outs. Death always seems to be close at hand in these stories, but so are liberating moments of seemingly accidental transcendence. Among all the bad behavior, there's several lifetimes worth of love, yearning, camaraderie and hope. Johnson relates his stories in an easy, fluid, familiar voice, but the stories here aren't just reportage from the rougher edges of society: there's a touch of weird mystery and magic in most of them, too. Junkies are compared to mermaids, trips to score dope turn into epic journeys, elements and characters seemingly drawn from fairy tales and mythology pop up in the most unexpected situations, mind-altering drugs are never, ever refused. If Carver's America is all about routine and the daily grind, everything that happens in "Jesus' Son" is a potential doorway to some sublime, or surreal, encounter. This is due, at least in part, to the author's absolutely first-rate prose: his descriptions can be both wildly original and impressively precise, and he's capable of lending the most banal, tossed-off conversations enormous emotional resonance. Of course, he makes it look effortless, but that only goes to show how good a writer he really was.

I suppose the other reason that Johnson's stories reminded me of Carver's is that they convey the enormous size of the American landscape in a similar sort of way. This is particularly true, I think, of the stories in "Jesus' Son" that are set in Iowa and mostly concern small-town drug addicts. His characters might be obsessed with getting their next fix, but Johnson also manages to convey the epic scale of the Midwestern plains, making them seem like a boundless, open space where anything might happen. Some readers may find the subject matter of these stories sort of distasteful, and I can understand that. But there's also something quintessentially American about them. For all the wandering that their characters do, part of the reason they work is that they seem so rooted in the American landscape. In Johnson's hands, scheming heroin addicts seem as much a part of the Midwest as cornfields. The subject matter can get pretty lurid, its characters -- no matter how desperate, addicted, or morally compromised, always come off as regular folks: there aren't any bohemians here. In a way, it's an incredibly deft reframing of what it means to live in, or write about, the United States, and that makes this little book of short stories seem downright important. Astonishing. Great. Five stars. Get your copy now. show less

The cancer of war.
Spreading like a plague from its epicentre, gorging on flesh, derailing minds, torturing emotions - only the strongest survive and then just barely.
An all pervading turmoil unbound by time or distance.
Entirely artificial, entirely human.

Tree of Smoke follows several characters in the Vietnam war, expertly leading the reader through its horrors from both sides of the engagement. Family, love, hopelessness, revenge, survival, purpose are all major themes, as they struggle show more with what truths they find in the choices they make. Anyone who has read 2666 by Robert Bolaño, should recall the chapter about the deaths. The saturated, desensitising prose so relentless to become paradoxically impressive. Tree of Smoke achieves something similar. What Denis Johnson has done here is capture war in all its atrocity.

I have now read five novels by Johnson and this is (so far) the jewel in the crown, despite its low 3.5 rating on goodreads, unsurprising, for two reasons:

1. War is a heavy subject matter which I doubt is every reader's idea of a 'good read' (I empathise of course and need time between books of this nature but war is so entwined in the human condition (sadly) that the subject leads to some of the very best writing - Birdsong, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Slaughterhouse 5, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, War and Peace and of course, Catch-22)

2. I read parts of Tree of Smoke and listened to parts on audiobook, which was read amazingly by the actor Will Patton (of which I include a link to an excerpt below). Patton's handling of voice differentiation for the dialogues between characters was sublime and really improved the clarity and dynamics of their interactions, which my own reading in my head couldn't replicate (instead leading to confusion and rereadings). Johnson is such a skilful writer of dialogue - he knows exactly what other people would say that the characters sound like real people. Complimented by Patton's reading, the effect is very powerful. I wonder if people who solely read the book appreciated this element in the same way?

This book is a work of art, cementing Johnson in modern literature as one of its greatest writers (in my humble opinion). Although he is now lost to us, I'm thankful there are so many more of his offerings I have left to read. Jesus' son is apparently his arguable best - it will have to be one hell of a book to surmount what Tree of Smoke achieves. It is another symbol, in addition to the other important books previously mentioned, of why people should read, not war.

Will Patton reading Tree of Smoke:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdDOGebqZr8 show less

My dream of perfection.

This exquisite novella fulfills my reading dreams, the kind of fiction I love best, done with exquisite subtlety and a pitch-perfect union of form and function.

The story is that of Robert Grainier, a manual laborer working and living in the American Northwest from the early 1900s until his death in the late 1960s. He marries and has a daughter. One day just a few years after marrying, while he is away at a logging camp working, a terrifying forest fire ravages their show more family home and the lives of his wife and toddler daughter. Thereafter, Grainier prefers a life of solitude and minimal society.

Like Grainier the man, the novella is stoic and taciturn. The backdrop of his life, told from birth to death in just 116 pages, is rough and fleeting beauty, matching that of the pristine Northwest forests as they were being logged and cleared for trains and the march of the twentieth century.

Grainier is no philosopher, no Thoreau; he's just a man making his living during his times. He is neither saint nor sinner. He will, though, sometimes reflect on certain regrets of his behavior. Sometimes he is inwardly awkward when dealing with others or with novel experiences. Not an especially self-reflecting man, but he is self-aware

Throughout, he has encounters with men and women, types typical of that period in the Northwest. After his wife's death, Grainier is not much interested in women and those encounters are infrequent and brief, almost anomalies that reflect the demographics of that time and place and reflecting Grainier's own hermit-like preference. Most of his interactions are with men, simple laborers similar to himself but far more gregarious and outlandish. They tell the tales of that era: the tall tales, the violent and often funny tales, the lively tales and the persistent rumors that chatty workmen tell to pass the time.

Living in the cabin he built for himself on a his few acres deep in the forest, Grainier is alert to his surroundings, its changes, its sights and sounds, and is, sometimes, awed by the magnificence. Alone, he is prone to spectral visions of his wife. He even sees his daughter once more in an unfathomable, troubling way. But none of these things especially alarm him—not the natural nor the supernatural—he accepts all things equally as part of the experiences of his life. He is effected but not alarmed.

In a review somewhere, I read Johnson's style compared as similar to Hemmingway. Since I don't much care for Hemmingway myself, I want to say a few things in case others might find that comparison a reason to not pick up Train Dreams.

Train Dreams is that of a humble life told humbly, an approach I've not found in Hemmingway tales, not even in Old Man and the Sea, although I suppose that might be the closest comparison. The life of Johnson's Grainer, equally physical and masculine as any Hemmingway protagonist, is that of an American in America during a specific time of change and challenges, unlike Hemmingway's heroes who travel the world looking for excitement and meaning. Grainier, too, endures trials but they are the universal kind. Nor does Grainer die young and heroically. His death, around age 70, comes inexorably in a body worn out by living and labor. Again, not a Hemmingway tale. I'll concede that Johnson also uses sparse so-called masculine language. If I must compare, then I say, "Imagine a Hemmingway story with less bravado and more sublimity."

My admiring review pales pitifully to convey the power of the original work. But isn't that the inescapable nature of encounters with art? There are the masterpieces and there are the admirers moved by it.

If American society reaches the book burning dystopia foretold in Fahrenheit 451, a direction that doesn't seem as far-fetched as it once did, I readily volunteer to be this book. show less

Depending on whether some manuscript emerges from a dusty drawer or water-stained box, this is [[Denis Johnson]]'s final publishers work, appearing the year following his death. Johnson is that rare poetic voice focused on the disaffected shadows of the world, and we are better for having him in the world. A deeper review of his work might well suggest those shadows he probed were, indeed, the dark corners of his own heart. And in [The Largesse of the Sea Maiden], a collection of short show more fiction, he is at his most quickening best. The Starlight on Idaho is an epistolary formed by the meanderings of an alcoholic during his umpteenth rehab stay - the contradictory ravings against and beseeching God, family, the world are all cover for the broken man's ravings against and beseeching himself, to be a better man or get on with it and end what's left of his life. Signature Bob follows the short term incarceration of a young man, where he meets a chorus of criminals along the spectrum from halfwit to mastermind. Doppelgänger, Poltergeist details a literature and creative writing professor who mentors a young phenom - a phenom who is obsessed with a conspiracy theory that Elvis didn't die on the day Elvis died, had actually been replaced by his not-deceased twin, that Elvis wasn't Elvis - the more I try to explain it the more madness arises.

It's not difficult to imagine DJ in a broken-down hotel rehabbed into a rehab facility, scratching out angry, hopeless letters; or in a backwoods jail reeking of urine and seat and despair; or in a classroom cooking up crazy conspiracy theories as he shared a bottle. I did, as I read these stories.

Highly recommended!!!!!
5 bones!!!!! show less