In this author’s universe, hallucinatory imaginings bleed into daily life, where reality itself can seem like a fevered nightmare.
In one of the rare interviews he did, the fiction writer and poet Denis Johnson — who died on Wednesday at 67 — was asked about his craft, and he quoted these lines from Joseph Conrad: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.”
In his own novels and poems, Mr. Johnson fulfilled that task with extraordinary savagery and precision. He used his startling gift for language to create word pictures as detailed and visionary, and as varied, as paintings by Edward Hopper and Hieronymus Bosch, capturing the lives of outsiders — the lost, the dispossessed, the damned — with empathy and unsparing candor. Whether set in the bars and motels of small-town America, or the streets of wartime Saigon, his stories depict people living on the edge, addicted to drugs or adrenaline or fantasy, reeling from the idiocies and exigencies of modern life, and longing for salvation.
There is a fierce, ecstatic quality to Mr. Johnson’s strongest work that lends his characters and their stories an epic, almost mythic dimension, in the best American tradition of Melville and Whitman. In the interlinked stories in “ Jesus’ Son ” (1992) , the narrator traverses the United States, moving through a grim, fluorescent-lit landscape of rundown bars and one-night cheap motels, and meeting a succession of misfits as alienated and desperate as himself — people who often seem like crazy, drug-addled relatives of the lost souls in Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” or strung-out exiles from a Lou Reed album.
In “ Fiskadoro ” (1985) , set in the near future after some sort of World War III-like disaster, an assortment of dreamers, con men and pirates inhabit an apocalyptic landscape in what used to be the Florida Keys, trying to hold on to fading memories of what the world used to be. And in “ Tree of Smoke ” (2007) , which won the National Book Award, a young intelligence officer finds himself caught in the wilderness of mirrors that was the Vietnam War — a war, in Mr. Johnson’s telling, not so different from our recent, disastrous engagement in Iraq — where it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between the well-intentioned and the mercenary, the honest and the duplicitous.
Mr. Johnson’s America, past or present, is uncannily resonant today. It’s a troubled land, staggering from wretched excess and aching losses, a country where dreams have often slipped into out-and-out delusions, and people hunger for deliverance, if only in the person of a half-baked messiah. Reason is in short supply here, and grifters and con men peddling conspiracy thinking and fake news abound; families are often fragmented or nonexistent; and primal, Darwinian urges have replaced the rule of law. And yet, and yet, amid the bewilderment and despair, there are lightning flashes of wonder and hope — glimpses of the possibility of redemption.
In “Tree of Smoke, ” “ The Stars at Noon ” (1986) and “ The Laughing Monsters ” (2014) , America seems to have exported some of its native-born madness — limning what Mr. Johnson saw as the country’s military or cultural colonization of large swaths of the globe. Poverty and chaos multiply abroad, where the sun and the heat fuel a sense that the center cannot hold, that things are indeed falling apart.
Mr. Johnson writes about those buses in Central America “that seem to drift out of history from Buchenwald and turn up in the third world to take impoverished people home.” And the “white sunshine” in the “hard land” of Africa, where traffic proceeds “African style, all honking, no braking.”
Plots in Mr. Johnson’s books tend to be tangled, melodramatic affairs — often highly indebted to famous works by Conrad, Graham Greene and Robert Stone — and in his lesser books, like “ Already Dead: A California Gothic ” (1997) , his writing can devolve into portentous philosophizing, larded with New Age and Nietzschean intonations.
But in his masterworks — “Fiskadoro, ” “Jesus’ Son, ” “Tree of Smoke” and his harrowing debut novel, “Angels” (1983) — his incandescent language channels his characters’ desperation. Here, his prose possesses both the steel and the lyricism of his verse, and is perfectly attuned to capturing the surreal proceedings in Johnsonland, where hallucinatory imaginings bleed into daily life, where reality itself can seem like a fevered nightmare.
“What I write about, ” Mr. Johnson once said, “is really the dilemma of living in a fallen world, and asking: ‘Why is it like this if there’s supposed to be a God?’ ”
