Read moreĪ salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping … A Cherokee filled with bourbon … A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student …Īnd a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri … The stories are short but many of them will stay with you a very long time. But now that I’ve named nearly all of the stories in the collection, I might just as well go on and say that any of the rest would be equally well worth a read.
Johnson was not the first to employ such a strategy, but I think he does it better than many who came before.Apart from “Emergency”, which sparkles like the gem that it is, I would also point to “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” “Two Men,” “Out on Bail,” “Dundun,” and “The Other Man” as especially worthy of note. At any rate it is a fascinating technique that you now see widespread. A kind of narrative truth? Certainly the lack of fidelity to what really happened does not tell against our belief in these narrators. Truth, perhaps, is not meant to inhere in correspondence with the world, but rather with something created through the telling. It happens so often that the reader will wonder what is the point of such unreliable narrators. Narrative cohesion is consistently undercut. They have very few redeeming qualities and are marked only by their drive for their next hit of whatever.The writing is spare and lean and almost always surprising. These are not the noble poor who sometimes populate Carver stories, or the unheralded but self-believing geniuses of Kerouac. You can find them at sad dives like the Vine tavern wearing medical bracelets cheating each other out of quarters.
More often Johnson’s characters have a surfeit of venial sins which burble into the mortal. Only rarely, as with George in the much-praised “Emergency”, does a character’s goodness supervene on his situation and lack of comprehension. They are typically lost young men seeking solace or oblivion in drink or drugs or sexual release. The voices of his narrators are raw, unadorned (except when wonder is the only appropriate reaction), unpretentious, and unprotected. Denis Johnson’s short stories set a standard in the late 20th century that has rarely been equalled.
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