Customer Reviews

Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond

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Denis Johnson is that rare and wonderful thing: a lyrical writer with a brain. This is a collection of non-fiction essays he has published over the last 20 years, and it should win him many new fans who aren't familiar with his acclaimed fiction and poetry. The title, "Seek", is well chosen. Johnson presents himself as a seeker after truth, both physical and metaphysical. He brings with him an open mind, an open heart and genuine humility. "The Civil War in Hell" shows his visit to the heart of darkness of the Liberian civil war, where he views along with other journalists a videotape of the torture of the nations former dictator. The funny "Down Hard Six Times", an account of his honeymoon/gold-prospecting trip to Alaska is both a cautionary tale and a celebration of wilderness. The amazing "Hippies" is an exorciating satire of a drug-addled gathering of aging flower-children over Independence Day. He writes an amazinglyly sympathetic account of a Kenneth Copeland "Bikers for Jesus" rally: Johnson, who defines himself as a Christian, finds genuine religiosity among the weirdness. "Three Deserts" has some of the best writing about the American west I have ever encountered (Johnson lives full-time in northern Idaho.) The high point of the book for me is the stunning "The Militia in Me." Here Johnson gets past the hysteria about "right-wing militias" and, without minimizing their anti-semitism and extremism, sees them as within the well-established tradition of American anti-government, pro-freedom orneriness. In many ways, the West really is a different country and Johnson is well-aware of this, more so than many a provincial Eastern writer. This is a terrific book. Buy it immediately.

Who could resist writing that sounds like a combination of Hunter S. Thompson and Julian Barnes? These stories delight but also provoke. ... the writing is always snappy: there are no excess words.

After the slightness of THE NAME OF THE WORLD, and the somewhat scattered ALREADY DEAD, Johnson returns to the form that made JESUS' SON such a classic in this collection of articles. The standout is hands-down the last piece on his f**cked-up experiences in Liberia. Also good are the glimpses you get into Johnson's personal life, including his marriage and subsequent honeymoon in the wilds of Alaska, where they try to pan for the gold from which they plan to fashion their wedding rings; the highly disorganized hippie festival he goes to; the bikers for Jesus; his short piece on his brief stint as a Boy Scout. If you're already a Johnson fan, SEEK is cause for celebration.

Who could resist writing that sounds like a combination of Hunter S. Thompson and Julian Barnes? These stories delight but also provoke. Despite the author's avowed stoner tendencies, the writing is always snappy: there are no excess words.

Johnson is one of those authors whose novels I've picked up at bookstores and skimmed the jackets of countless times, but never reached the point of actually buying. However, this collection of eleven essays caught my attention and I figured I could dip into it for a brief taste of his writing. For some reason, the edition I have fail to indicate when they were originally written and/or published. This was incredibly irksome, especially in the travel pieces, in which the knowing the year would be very valuable context. In most cases it is easily deduced via the internet, but I can't fathom why the publishers didn't include this information. Beyond that distraction, the essays are almost uniformly well-written, and almost uniformly lacking in any striking insights. They can more or less be divided into three groups: journeys into the self, journeys into American subcultures, and journeys abroad.

The journeys into the self include an account of his honeymoon panning for gold in Alaska, an inauspicious childhood flirtation with the Boy Scouts, and a meandering exploration of his own libertarian streak. The first two are well-told stories which fail to leave any lasting impression, and the last crumbles under the weight of its own overblown language. One stylistic tic that really grates is Johnson's use of the third person in referring to himself within many of the essays. Several times, I was part way through a piece only to realize that the person Johnson was writing about was actually himself -- it really doesn't work.

The journeys into the American subculture are somewhat interesting, as pretty much any reasonably well-written account of a subculture will be. However, in them, Johnson seems to be surprised by things that seem like they should be rather obvious. For example, at a massive Christian biker rally, he seems surprised to find nice Christian bikers! And a huge hippie gathering proves to be eerily well-organized, wow, who'd a thunk those hippies could pull that off? Finally, in the North Carolina countryside where fugitive terrorist bomber Eric Rudolph was thought to hiding out, the locals prove to be rather sympathetic toward him. (The sublime epilogue to this essay is that two years after the book was published, Rudolph became the first FBI Top 10 fugitive arrested while dumpster diving.)

The journeys abroad all take place in the early to mid-1990s, to countries in the midst of civil war (Liberia, Somalia and Afghanistan). These are vividly written examples of the journalist as subject of cosmic/comic misadventure and bearer of witness to horrible things. Johnson writes engagingly about his experiences, but the experiences themselves are no different than those of any foreign correspondent in a war zone. And since some 15+ years have passed since his experiences, one is left thirsty for an update or epilogue for each of these. On the whole, like a lot of essay collections, this is really of primary interest to those who are already fans of Johnson's writing. Others may find interesting tidbits here and there, but it's a pretty standard essay collection.

That's one of the main reasons I really like Denis Johnson. He is an evolution of Jack Kerouac, minus the jazz and plus the confusion. He's a Jack Kerouac who could live a stable life and write about America after making a living on his books. Hippies comprise a large percentage of America's soulful reality. It's there you find the dead-end dreamers and romantics. Hemingway these days is in the Peace Corps or selling LSD on some parking lot. I also like the parts about Africa and Kuwait. Johnson, you can send me a postcard anytime from anywhere.

As the great author and prophet Copernicus again notes, human beings are pattern-seekers. They opt to give up richness of possibility in trade for predictability and familiarity. Even though none of these patterns ever fits any better than Cinderella's slipper fit her stepsisters. Human beings seek rigid, simple patterns that defy and impoverish their dynamic, multifaceted capacity. The one pattern that human beings have locked themselves into is the simple, rigid pattern of "God," even though there are many other patterns to use, including many that better accommodate their fluid, complexity. What "God" this may be is unclear, since they all seem to talk about the same one and since there have been at least 2,500 Gods concocted and documented during human history. Denis Johnson takes us to some of the margins of human society, where the only common theme is a desperate, fruitless, and vicious seeking -- the harshness and the brutality backed up by this ubiquitous "God." If we want to see the inadequacy of this pattern and start looking for better ones -- more congruent with our design and potential -- Denis Johnson's book might be one that begins to open our eyes.