I liked Tree of Smoke a little more than Already Dead, though they share similar narrative bugaboos and stylistic quirks. I think it has something to do with the choice of content; Johnson is Johnson no matter what he writes, but Tree of Smoke was largely propelled by the vast energy that comes from the business of making war. There's a reason so many suspense thrillers are set in the middle of military operations.

Here the energy is generated by a larger than life archetype (think dimensions of Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden). I loved the experience of reading it but ultimately felt less involved than with his other work.

But I think this, and really the rest of Denis johnson's work, is a great rebuke to those who focus on plot, plot, plot to keep readers interested. A skilled writer can keep you interested in almost anything; it's all in how the writing's done.

Top 5 book

Probably the strangest Denis Johnson book I have read to date. Very surreal. McCarthy on hallucinogenics, dark, and way out there. Even more so than Tree of Smoke, (that one took an effort to get through). Disjointed, sometimes hard to follow. And yet, very enjoyable, (if you like the dark spaces; and I do).

It's the Johnson take on a Stephen King book: metaphysical murder musings that gave me bad dreams. A worthy read - some of his most beautiful writing paired with a digressive plot that never quite coheres or disperses in the way you want it to.

Billed as "contemporary noir", this book is set along the coast of northern California in the 1990s. It follows a small group of locals centered around the heir to a small fortune whose life is in ruins, and eventually in jeopardy as his debts and mistakes pile up. I'm a sucker for Denis Johnson's writing, and I thoroughly enjoyed this, even if it comes off the rails a bit at the end. The prose here is pretty dense, and there are a lot of jump cuts back and forth in time, so I'd recommend making sure you have time to dig in and focus if you're going to read it.

More two and a half, I guess? This is peppered with genuine moments of beautiful writing, and a few decent scenes. But it took me forever to read because I couldn't be bothered to give a damn about it's interchangeable sensitive tough-guy dude characters, virtually all of whom are written in the same love-and-violence voice, or the parade of exceedingly sexually available female characters. (Seriously, is there any female character here under the age of 60 who doesn't immediately go to bed with whichever man she encounters? So much so that it's almost written as a joke when one finally turns a man down. Lordy.) The plot meanders with less craft than lack of focus, and the language is overwritten and obscure a lot of the time (over and over I had to reread passages to figure out what was going on, or try to dig up crucial details the author apparently left out on purpose to make reading more of a challenge?). It IS pretty sometimes, but most of the time it's not and I came to resent Johnson for making me work twice as hard for nothing in particular. By two thirds of the way through I'd come to see reading this as a chore more than a pleasure, but having so loved Jesus' Son and also enjoyed Resuscitation of the Hanged Man, I wanted to see if Johnson could pull out of the spiral. He didn't, for me, this time around. This felt like a loose, unfocused first draft, and reading it therefore felt like a waste of time, though at least a waste with occasional fantastic passages.

This book was interminable. Great writing, but boy did it go on. And on. And on. The phrase 'sunken costs fallacy' kept running through my mind from about halfway through.

I like Denis Johnson's shorter novels and short stories a lot. But this one, despite some great writing in parts, I found dull for larger parts. Peopling a whole book with oddballs is both confusing as there is little to differentiate them and then ultimately, tedious. Disapponting really.

I made it to page 192 of 435 before I finally gave up and threw in the towel. I kept hoping it would get better... there were little snippets that were promising, but they were few and far between, and I was too tired of dealing with drugged-out surreal-babble.

The plot is fairly thin, buttressed by multiple interesting characters. However, the set pieces and internal monologues are meandering and ponderous. I found it a bit hard to keep the characters straight in my mind and had to go back often in confusion. None of this would have been an issue if the book were 250-300 pages. Clocking in at 400+ was just too much of a death march for me and I bailed before the end.

A flawed but beautifully written novel. Falls apart a bit at the end, but it kind of had to do so, really.

Clear, dense, lyrical, convoluted as The Big Sleep, a tale of intersecting fates and levels of reality on the Mendocino Coast of California. Fairchild, the grower of pot, son of a real Steinbeckian/Keseyish owner of 10,000 acres of uncut redwood, is the cause and center of the disaster which swirls out from his clever, overheated, lying, imaginative, cowardly, self-justifying self--an inevitable screwup over a drug deal.

What a cast and crew--Fairchild's schizophrenic brother, living in the redwoods where he's trying literally to avoid the radar emitting from large domes in the hills. His soon to be ex-wife, Winona, to whom the father has deeded all Fairchild's inheritance, to keep the marriage together. His little hippie mistress, Melissa, who is sleeping with everyone and has no idea how obsessed Fairchild is with her. Frankenheimer, surfer, paranoid, whom Melissa is obsessed with. Clarence Meadows, Fairchild's partner in the pot plantation. Etcetera. Mix in a witch and a cop from LA and hired killers and ministers of various stripes and soul thieves, a good heaping handful of the lingering Sixties, mix it up and pour it out among the redwoods on the world's most spectacular stretch of coastline, and you have Johnson's 'Already Dead.'

Is it a mess? Probably. Is it a splendid mess? Absolutely. A Pyncheonesque outpouring of invention? Sure. However, it was Robert Stone who kept coming most to mind as I read. The book is very like a gorgeous, perilous, violent, self-justifying, Sixties-inflected Stone. The care taken in every sentence takes this book off the map into the region of pure untrammeled beauty. The richness of observation has all the earmarks of love-- for what do we see this deeply but the object of love? These deeply understood characters in all their dangerous quirks. I loved the unapologetic use of dreams and madness. That the news and newspapers figure in the book, that everyone reads and has had his or her worldview shaped by literature.

Here's a random example of Johnson's descriptive firepower. Here's Fairchild's point of view: "Vagueness came up over the ridge in billows. I'd had PG&E put a street lamp at the head of the driveway, it cost less than seven dollars a month, and they took care of the thing. Its glow a quarter-mile off seemed unattainable, seemed imaginary. A large creature, an owl probably, in this atmosphere it looked white, swept up from under the edge of the hill behind me and passed directly over my head. I could hear its wingstrokes like desperate breaths. I followed around to the front of the house and watched it moving off toward the front gate and the streetlight, where its shadow opened out from behind it like a tunnel through the lamp-lit fog.The tunnel closed to nothing as the bird passed over the source, and now there was only the iridescent mist. Everything looked so much like a science-ficion comic book it hardly seemed possible to be inside it and not to be able to turn a page..."

Here's Clarence Meadows, a decorated Iraqi war vet, thinking about the action which won him his scars: "But the dream had all the feelings, slowed down as if for savoring--or maybe they savored him--that during the actual events had been smeared sideways by motion and soaked in a wondrous deafness. Clarence dreamed of driving in the open jeep across Beirut with the sunrise burning over his shoulder. He didn't know what they were heading for but they were heading straight toward it. This was a general scramble of hysterical proportions, anyway, some brief, giant thing had torn into the day like a can opener..."

It's a very masculine book--there are wonderful women characters, but the point of view characters are all men--another aspect which heightens the Stone-ishness of it. And I enjoyed seeing the various viewpoints of men as they considered the women and their relationships to them--with great acuity.

One of my favorite parts concerned the central character, Fairchild, considering that his whole life has been built on lies. What a remarkable understanding of human weakness, the way each action has its repercussions, definitely the Karmic central theme of the book:

"Maneuvering through my lies was like hopping faster than the eye would follow from branch to branch across the roof of a jungle, a jungle cultivated to cover up earlier lies, the whole business lacing back delicately to find its mother-root in my first lie, completely forgotten now, and never to be discovered by anybody else, the lie to cover my first little crime, also forgotten--no, I swear I didn't take the cookies--or more probably, a whole childhood fashioned to avoid the question of the cookies in the first place, my every move, to this day, warped around the absence of getting caught, the void where there should have been my arrest and trial and punishment: a new route to school planned in order to avoid the boy who owned the stolen cookies, and a reason invented to explain the new route to whoever might ask, and evidence concocted to demonstrate that the reason isn't a lie--I need the exercise, I'm going out for track and field--and then a career of track-and-field events and long practice in a sport that doesn't interest me, and a new personality shaped, a false persona who thrives on track and field, who loves running (But I do love running. Don't I? Or why else pend so much time doing it?) and hurdling over the intricacies of his falsehoods toward this day, Tuesday, September 4, when I'm ready to commit murder to deal with my mistakes without actually correcting them because... because I don't want to correct them. I can't survive the correcting of them. I just want them erased."

I'll stop quoting but the book is covered with underlines and check marks and notes in the margins.

It has some of the problems that a book told through multiple points of view often have--in dividing the readers' loyalty out among so many characters, it's hard to pull together a fully satisfying ending--though Johnson does his damnedest.

Friends were surprised to hear that this was my first Denis Johnson--I guess people normally start with Jesus' Son. The new 'Train Dreams' is also a big hit. I happen to love Northern California, so I started here, and don't regret it. Johnson fans--Which should I read next? Jesus' Son or Train Dreams?