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How many readers of Denis JohnsonsJesus Sonhave wondered what happens to Fuckhead when he grows up?
He spends his days among the unwell who nobody else ever sees.
Hes called a writers writer, but his audience is in fact legion.
There are people walking around who know his books by heart.
You probably know somebody like that.
But maybe by the time you read it.
None of these narrators is Fuckhead, but all of them, we suspect, could be.
After all, we never learn his real name.
Salvation plots definedJohnsons life and work the rare American writer who worked in exile from the American Dream.
Johnson himself knew there was something spectral about his own survival and his art.
Within the spectrum of postwar American fiction, Johnson is hard to classify.
It may even surprise some of his readers.
Rather than representative men and women, Johnson wrote about hard cases, freaks, and ghosts.
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Johnsons legend began with shades of an American Rimbaud.
The 1970s were Johnsons lost years.
I went from prodigy to prodigal in a hurry, he told the New YorkTimesin 2002.
But becoming a writer requires more than an M.F.A.
and a drinking habit.
Johnson associated intoxication with inspiration, but his vices were an obstacle to writing.
Hospitalized more than once for alcoholism, he also used heroin, though he was never a full-on junkie.
You have to be prepared to enter into all kinds of adventures that I wasnt strong enough for.
He wasnt strong enough, either, to become a novelist.
The climactic bank robbery is one of the prettiest scenes in all of American crime fiction.
In the center of his heart, the tension of a lifetime dissolved into honey.
What Johnson was doing wasnt psychological realism, and it never would be.
The damned and the saved lie someplace beyond what we call psychology.
Johnson said, That book is America made bleak.
If you take away the TVs, whatve you got?
When you take the American Dream out of America, what do you have left?
Tribes of weirdos living in huts on the beach decorated with parts from cars that no longer drive.
The hippie flourishes of Johnsons prose till now give way to a truly hard-boiled voice.
Does fuck you sound simple enough?
; in fact, Kim Gordon wrote The Sprawl by raiding Johnsons prose.
If he wasnt yet famous, he was seeping into the culture.
But the quartet finished with a dud.
He takes in drag shows and goes to church a lot.
Religion moves from subtext to text.
The prose is low-octane and for once hard to confuse with poetry.
Around this time Johnsons life wasnt entirely unfucked up.
A trip to the Philippines forEsquireyielded an unfulfilled assignment and a case of malaria.
A second marriage fell apart, and the IRS was after him for $10,000.
He was in need of saving again.
In Christian terms, the junkie is the sinner pushed to the extreme, the saint inverted.
Fuckheads very hostile but at the same time hes worshipful, Johnson told the journalColumbiain 1993.
He sees a man on a train and follows him to a laundromat: His chest was like Christs.
Thats probably who he was.
Within the books fallen world, everyone seems to have a dual identity.
A farmhouse full of jocks turns out to be a drug den: Football people.
I didnt know they ever got like that.
This applies to Fuckhead too.
Its not simple drunken sentimentality that lets Fuckhead see light inside the worst people he encounters.
His left hand didnt know what his right hand was doing.
It was only that certain important connections had been burned through.
The stylistic debt is obvious.
Under such circumstances, the pathetic fallacy a characters feelings being projected onto the world becomes concrete reality.
The book provides the illusion of a clarifying delirium, like a good drug experience.
These characterize all of Johnsons fiction, but in this book theyre delivered at a high concentration.
You dont soon forget these images, though you might forget that they all fill the same book.
He sees her husband wash her feet in what seems to be a gesture of apology.
Would he be forgiven for being a peeping Tom?
Fuckheads questing and his transgressing are still one and the same impulse.
He wrote four plays.
One useful way to categorize them is as a set of opposing pairs.
There are two long novels,Already Dead(1997) andTree of Smoke(2007).
The middle-aged man who narrates the magnificent title story lives in San Diego and works in advertising.
But his past isnt squeaky-clean either, and memory is a zone of regret.
Hes an impostor in the matrix of the American Dream.
She does volunteer work, things like teaching adults how to read.
Its Elaine who brings together the characters in the storys opening scene, a dinner party.
A woman wants to see the amputees stump.
The man agrees to remove his prosthesis if she kisses his scar.
Like many of Johnsons narrators, this one is indifferent to our sympathies.
Altogether, the storys catalogue of moments from middle age constitute a preparation for death.
At any moment the very next second she could be dead.
The Twin Towers fall halfway through the story, a whopper of an allegory for American paranoia.
The equipment isnt expensive, and you’ve got the option to pursue this occupation anywhere.
You dont have to be high-functioning, or even, for the most part, functioning at all.
Bouts of poverty come along, anxiety, shocking debt, but nothing lasts forever.
Ive gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once.
That means to write what you would never say.
As if ink is so precious you cant waste it.
His material was the stuff of the confessional and the AA meeting.
His youth had taught him that life could be, would be, short.
*This article appears in the January 8, 2018, issue of New York Magazine.
