Poetic, profound and perfectly perverse.

Johnson is not for people that want an easy ride through a plot or happy endings, more a dragging of the loathsome and emotionally crippled into a light that reflects a society that allows their predictable disintegration to get that far.

i read already dead by him 7 years ago, and then i thought he only had 2 other books. but then i found a bunch more at the library. anyway, it was good, full of morally questionable characters and situations that made me laugh out loud. very dark.

I might talk myself out of the the fourth star in time, but it was such a page turner and I'm still riding the high.

It's hard to relate what is so enjoyable about the hallucinatory tale of this loser bumbling around in small town New England, working in a radio station and as a PI. Slowly he unravels more and more and finally finds himself at peace in a miserable place. Moments of humor are definitely part of it, like the protagonist talking with a Vietnamese immigrant (relevant to mention, at this point of the story, it's 1981)

"Do you ever wish you could go back to Vietnam?", English was nervous asking the question; it felt like prying.
"They are all dead there. My parents, and my brother, too, and all relatives. It's no good there."
"Was your brother a pilot?"
"He was a monk."
"A Catholic?" English was astonished.
"No. Buddhist." He smiled. "My brother did the self-immolation."
"Jesus Christ, " English said.
"No," Minh said. "Buddha."

So, I found this author via the Pynchon subreddit and there was a book in my library, thus I gave it a shot. Overall, it's not bad, but the odd story about an oddball was promising at best.

What a trip this was. I didn't expect this from Denis Johnson which I guess just means I hardly know the man's work. And that's a reference to the book's subject not the author's obvious quality. It's a sort of neo noir, hazy and dreamlike, set in a coastal town, with our protagonist finely balancing between sanity and whathaveyou. And then, the Denis Johnson I know from Jesus' Son appears and wraps up a story that is great fun and original. Or so I thought.

In the end, I could only get through half of this book. I kept picking it up, putting it down. Like a Planet Fitness commercial! The few sentences Johnson had here that were poetic and beautiful, were just that, few and far between.

I was hoping things would start to come together and make sense. I was hoping I would start to like Lenny. I wanted to keep going to try and understand what in the world Leanna saw in Lenny that made her want to be with him - on any level. Their conversations and interactions left much to be desired. Nothing was making sense elsewhere with all of the other characters either.

Perhaps a plot was just around the corner, perhaps I should have kept going and read a few more words, a few more pages until things fell into place.... but at more than halfway through, I lost all interest. I could very well be missing something here too. I probably just popped my Denis Johnson cherry with the wrong book.

No one ever went to the late-great Denis Johnson for coherence. If you’re looking for plot, you’ve made a wrong turn—like Lenny English, the barely-clinging-to-sanity protagonist (“hero” is a stretch) of this 1991 rambler. After a suicide attempt (“You tried to kill yourself?” “I didn’t succeed.”) English crashes his car in Cape Cod & stumbles into a gig as a part-time private eye & late-night DJ. (About as Johnson-y as it gets.) He’s tracking down missing persons, but he thinks God’s looking for him. A metaphysical mystery that doesn’t hold up. (Gay characters weren’t Johnson’s strength.) Expect no answers.

I really got a kick out of this novel being set in my hood, practically. I found out later that Johnson was living in Wellfleet when he wrote this where I lived for quite some time. I realize this is just geek trivia...good Denis Johnson, but not my favorite of his so far.

Leonard English is a wonderful sad-sack character and being inside his head as he opens up to possibilities of being in a world far different than he ever imagined back in Lawrence Kansas is so much excellent good fun.

Some people were crazy about this. I was not one of them.

“He didn’t pray anymore for faith, because he’d found that a growing certainty of the Presence was accompanied by a terrifying absence of any sign or feeling or manifestation of it. He was afraid that what he prayed to was nothing, only this limitless absence. I’ll grow until I’ve found you, and you won’t be there.”
After a failed suicide attempt, a man moves to the gay hub of New England to restart his life. He takes a job as a radio deejay-cum-private investigator. While searching for a missing person, he tries to find redemption in love, in religion, but only manages to find his own mounting desperation. This is a strange novel. The scenes are surreal, the characters unique, and the dialogue is at times deep and others ineffectual. But if you manage to make it the whole way through, you see that Johnson is exercising some profound notions. Mostly that faith is a hollow endeavor, and that life and death are equally absurd. The third act builds towards this cacophonous and powerful denouement that is slightly ruined by the addition of the epilogue, but if you’ve read Johnson at any length, you know that his books are known for their gravitas and frivolity; the latter of which can be found in the following exchange:
“Two years ago I tried to hang myself to death,” English said.
“I’m listening,” the priest said.
“The thing is – sometimes I think I succeeded. Sometimes I think I really died.”
“Well of course you did.”
Stunned silence. The room was choked with orchids. At last someone was telling him the truth. He was dead.
“If you tried sincerely, then you succeeded in cancelling your life. It was an act of perfect faithlessness. You’d reached the absolute end,” Father Michael said. “Maybe it was the only thing you could do.”
A weird piece of post-post-modern fiction about faith, mortality, and identity.
3.5 Stars

I really got into it early on, when it gave off a Carver vibe, but it seemed to lose focus along the way and meandered towards a fairly uneven and sloppy end. Still, the writing was solid, and some of the themes presented here would be improved and expanded upon in his later, greater works. Having read Tree of Smoke earlier this year, seeing the minor connection between the two books through Ray Sands was fun, especially since they were written over a decade apart.

I would only recommend to Denis Johnson super-fans, should such people exist.