Denis Johnson's poems and novels provide candid, slice-of-life perspectives on offbeat subjects. In his first verse collection, The Man among the Seals, he included poems about a man imagining an auto mishap and one speculating about the lives of two mice trapped in mousetraps. These and other poems in the volume were prized for their lively structure—rolling rhythms and sometimes jarring line breaks—as well as for their somewhat odd points of view. A critic in Virginia Quarterly Review called The Man among the Seals "an astonishing first book" and praised the poems as "dramatically satisfying and whole." The reviewer also marveled at Johnson's accomplished writing—he was only twenty when the book appeared—and declared that the poems seemed those "of a mature writer in mid-career."

In his second collection, Inner Weather, "Johnson forgoes some of his stylistic experimentation," related Joe Nordgren in the Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets Since World War II, Third Series. Because of this, "his poetic structure more consistency complements his poems' sense and themes," Nordgren added. Most of the fifteen poems in this collection are about ordinary people in despair. "While dramatizing daily events and searching for ways to allow his subjects to project themselves, he accounts for the less than perfect, the less than dazzling aspects of life that people gloss over so as to avoid blame or guilt," Nordgren observed.

Johnson next published The Incognito Lounge, and Other Poems, which strengthened his reputation as a chronicler of the unusual aspects of American culture. His characters are sad, lonely, often on the margins of society, denizens of seedy bars and greasy-spoon diners. The title poem, according to Nordgren, is "a frightening—at times surreal—descent into the refuse of fallen lives." Yet Johnson does not look down on these characters, and he recognizes that they are capable of redemption, Nordgren added. Alan Williamson, critiquing the collection in the New York Times Book Review, declared that Johnson is "good at American voices" and added that he convincingly "suffers over the anomie he describes."A commentator for Antioch Review was even more impressed, calling The Incognito Lounge "a welcome antidote to any number of literary and spiritual malaises." The critic cited "the scalding wit of the poems" and contended that The Incognito Lounge was among "the most appealing and exciting books" of 1982.

Johnson's body of poetic work, including later collections The Veil and The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New, shows his poetry to be "distinguished by its stylistic vitality and emotional honesty, indicating his intense engagement with language and experience," in Nordgren's opinion. "Forgiveness and surviving memories and mistakes of the past are his dominant themes, since it is impossible to live, in his words, as a 'fallen person.'"

Johnson followed The Incognito Lounge with his first novel, Angels, which tells of two desperate characters—Jamie and Bill—and their decline into crime. Jamie and Bill meet on a bus leaving Oakland, California, where Jamie had just left her unfaithful husband. Heading east with her two children, Jamie befriends Bill, a thrice-divorced ex-convict with whom she becomes romantically involved. In Pittsburgh, the lovers part, with Bill heading for Chicago. Jamie eventually travels there too, to find Bill, but she is raped during her search. After the lovers rejoin, they travel to Phoenix, Bill's hometown. There Jamie succumbs to drug addiction and Bill resumes his criminal activities. Near the book's end, drugged-out Jamie is committed to an asylum. Bill, who had murdered a prison guard, awaits execution.

Angels earned critical praise for Johnson's evocation of American life's grimmer aspects. Newsweek's Peter S. Prescott called Johnson "an accurate and unsentimental observer of people and events" and commended his skill at making readers "know his characters rather better than we might want—to the point of forgiveness." Prescott called Angels "a beautiful book." Speer Morgan, writing in Saturday Review, also cited Johnson's ability in eliciting readers' "empathy with [the novel's] characters." Morgan deemed Angels "a fine first novel."

In his second novel, Fiskadoro, Johnson wrote of life after a nuclear holocaust. Set in the near future, Fiskadoro presents a world of mutants, primitive fisherman and traders. Among these survivors are Grandmother Wright, a one-hundred-year-old woman—half Chinese—who has lost her ability to speak; A. T. Cheung, a ragtime clarinetist who is preoccupied with history; and Fiskadoro, Cheung's protégé, who lacks memory and thus seems the most likely candidate to contend with the future.

Some critics were exuberant in recommending Fiskadoro as a compelling tale of survival and acceptance. Newsweek's Prescott, who called Fiskadoro "a remarkable novel," wrote that its "principal theme concerns the problems of learning what has been lost and the role memory plays in survival." Similarly, Bruce Van Wyngarden wrote in Saturday Review that Fiskadoro presents "a world where knowledge is a shattered mirror and no one has more than a couple of pieces." Van Wyngarden deemed Johnson's second novel "a world of bewitching power." Stephen Dobyns in the Washington Post Book World, described Fiskadoro as "beautifully written and constantly entertaining" and called Johnson "a wonderful story-teller."

Johnson's next novel, The Stars at Noon, failed to elicit the praise accorded his previous books, however. Set in 1984 in Managua, Nicaragua, the story revolves around the activities of its self-destructive narrator—a "North American female prostitute-drifter with a press card, which has been revoked"—and her lover, referred to only as "the Englishman," who is on the run after passing Costa Rican industrial secrets to the Sandinistas. "Johnson apparently means for this novel to address a modern condition marked by cynicism and despair," wrote John Gabree in the Washington Post. The critic added that the "narrator is so bent on her own corruption it is impossible to tell where the boundaries of good and evil lie, or whether there is any good at all. . . . All that is being played out in these pages are the final twitches of a dying soul." Michiko Kakutani declared in the New York Times that The Stars at Noon successfully "conjures up a hellish vision of Managua and the outlying country through dozens of details and heat-glazed images," but found that "we never really care whether or not [the protagonist] betrays her lover, and we certainly never care what eventually happens to her. Mr. Johnson's shimmering descriptions of Central America provide us with moments of relief, but in the end, his narrator's tiresome voice drags the novel down, submerging the magic of his prose."

Critics have noted a variety of influences on Johnson's work, particularly his fiction—one critic compares Fiskadoro to both Samuel Beckett's work and reggae music. In the New York Times Book Review, Johnson acknowledged an eccentric assortment of influences ranging from the writings of Robert Stone and Flannery O'Connor to the songs of Bob Dylan and the music of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. Johnson added: "Other influences come and go, but those I admire the most and those I admired the earliest . . . have something to say in every line I write."

Jesus' Son, Johnson's first collection of short fiction, consists of eleven brief, interconnected stories narrated by an unnamed young man who is addicted to drugs and alcohol. The book's title comes from Lou Reed's song "Heroin" ("When I'm rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus' son"), and addiction of one sort or another figures prominently in each of the stories. Indeed, drugs and alcohol are virtually the only constants in the narrator's life; the settings of the stories vary (rural Iowa, Seattle, Phoenix), as do the man's friends, and the reader learns nothing about his past. He reveals himself exclusively through his words and his various incarnations: a hitchhiker, a barfly, the owner of a $60 car with no brakes. Those around him are an assortment of lowlifes and losers, inhabitants of a bleak and often violent American demimonde. The most striking feature of these stories, however, is the incantatory, almost dreamlike, quality of the narrator's voice. Although almost every story recounts some gruesome or sensational incident—a horrific car accident, a bizarre emergency room case, a pointless shooting—the narrator's voice remains eerily matter-of-fact throughout.

Jesus' Son received numerous positive reviews. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani lauded Johnson's "dazzling gift for poetic language, his natural instinct for metaphor and wordplay." Nation reviewer Marianne Wiggins found that "reading these stories is like reading ticker tape from the subconscious." And Todd Grimson, a Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor, noted, "Denis Johnson writes as though he inhabits a waking dream." Jack Miles concluded a long Atlantic Monthly review of the collection with these words: "Denis Johnson's path as a writer . . . is as untypical as his vision, but Jesus' Son may eventually be read not just as a moment in his evolution but as a distinctive turn in the history of the form. He is doing something deeply new in these stories, and the formal novelty brings us into a new intimacy with the violence that is rising around us in this country like the killing waters of a flood." Interestingly, Johnson, himself a recovered drug and alcohol addict, was at first reluctant to publish the collection, even though most of the stories had already appeared in various periodicals. He considered the work too autobiographical, too personal. As he remarked to a Washington Postinterviewer in 1993, "The reason I wasn't publishing them is I didn't want people to say, 'Oh, look at this guy!' But I don't think we really have the right to make decisions like that. Authors should think of themselves as dead."

The response of some critics to Johnson's next novel, Already Dead: A California Gothic, was not nearly as positive. The book seemed to perplex, even to annoy, several reviewers. Set in rural northern California, this complex, labyrinthine "gothic" (which features trolls, spirits, and all manner of New Age devotees) centers on Nelson Fairchild, Jr., an alcoholic marijuana farmer who stands to inherit a substantial fortune. Nelson has a great many problems, including being targeted by hit men, but his main concern is how to get rid of his estranged wife. Nelson's dying father, a devout Catholic who will not tolerate divorce, plans to leave his fortune to this estranged wife, hoping thereby to sustain his son's marriage. Nelson, however, has other plans, and sets out to find someone to kill his wife. In Carl Van Ness, he finds the perfect candidate, for Van Ness, a violent criminal bent on self-destruction, is, for all intents and purposes, "already dead."

But the plot of Already Dead defies easy summarization or encapsulation. David Gates, writing in the New York Times Book Review, found the plot engulfed in "murk," but noted, "That's not a knock, necessarily. Johnson is a wonderful writer, and murk is one of the things he does best—even if it sometimes swamps the proceedings entirely." Gates, who considered the entire novel "a little over the top," went on to observe, "Johnson's characters, even the nonviolent ones, are so convincingly scary it's uncomfortable to be in their company." In a New York magazine review of the novel, Luc Sante wrote, "The narrative does not describe an arc so much as some kind of fractal meander." After wondering whether Johnson realized "how unbearable his protagonist is," or whether the book merely suffered from "a case of absent editor," Sante remained perplexed: "[B]ecause Johnson is such a splendid writer, and so tricky and idiosyncratic and non-Euclidian, . . . there may be something else afoot. Maybe it's all a test."

The short novel The Name of the World focuses on a university professor's efforts to get on with his life following the deaths of his wife and daughter in an automobile accident. For the first few years after the tragedy, the professor, Michael Reed, is existing rather than living; then an unconventional young woman—a cellist and a stripper who nevertheless reminds Reed of his lost loved ones—comes along to shake him up. An Economist reviewer noted that the plot "would seem slight, unless it happened to you" and dubbed the book "a triumph of tone,"filled with offbeat observations. New York Times Book Reviewcommentator Robert Stone thought that sometimes the novel's "transitions are rocky, and the view can be dim. At other times, Johnson's unique lyricism lights up his book's interior world."Stone found the character of the cellist-stripper, Flower Cannon, "improbably believable, one of the book's finer creations," but Richard Eder, writing in the daily New York Times, deemed Reed's relationship with her "arbitrary and gestural, a necromancy that is incantation and very little magic." Eder contended that even though parts of the book were strong, Johnson's writing eventually turned into "poetic curdle." Newsweek critic David Gates, however, considered The Name of the World "a haunting novella," while a Publishers Weekly contributor remarked that it "manages to be both lyrical and raw." The Economist reviewer concluded, "Deft, moving, and wonderfully odd, this is a slim novel in physical size only."

In Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond, Johnson collected eleven essays written over a twenty-year period. They explore a diverse cross-section of people all searching for something to believe in and for a life that stands apart from the values of mainstream America. The people he writes about include Christian bikers, hippies, and right-wing militiamen. Although always present in his anecdotes, Johnson only refers to himself in the third person or as a separate character, a technique that creates "an askew, out-of-body point of view," in the opinion of a Publishers Weekly reviewer. While this strains his credibility as a reporter, it "adds sincerity to his plight as a human," noted the writer, who concluded that Seek is "intriguing and insightful."

May 1979

From this Issue

poetry-magazineFrom the magazine:Meditations on the Field Museum

poetry-magazineFrom the magazine:Lost Objects

poetry-magazineFrom the magazine:Limits

Table of Contents

From the magazine:
Meditations on the Field Museum

From the magazine:
Lost Objects

From the magazine:
Limits