The thing I hate about library books sometimes is having to give them back. The thing that comforts me is the thought of someone else checking them out. Which brings me to Denis Johnson. Reading Seek, a collection of long pieces of journalism, he reminds me of Joan Didion, in that he goes for people and stories outside the mainstream. He rocks the New-Journo style too, so straightforward that the full horror of the situation at hand (as in Liberia) comes upon you suddenly, crushingly.
His fiction is the same way: Jesus’ Son, Angels, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man all skirt along the margins, this last maybe most of all. It’s about a man who moves from the Midwest to Provincetown after a failed suicide attempt, picks up a shady detective job, falls in love with a lesbian and slowly grows more and more delusional until he finally dresses in drag, steals a boat and tries to shoot the Archbishop. Disorienting in the deepest sense. (Incidentally, if you liked The Crying of Lot 49, you might like this too. Except where Pynchon leaves things murky, Johnson’s guy is clearly making connections where there are none, is clearly insane.)
The disconcerting thing for me is that I never fully settled into it the way I did with Jesus’ Son or Angels. A lot of the instability in both of these, I think, came from the outside, and here it’s all internal. It’s not that he takes us over unfamiliar terrain — he brings us to the center of an earthquake, some beautiful backwoods country no one’s ever heard of swallowing itself up.
