Author Denis Johnson Dies
National Book Award-winning novelist and the author of Tree of Smoke and the short story collection Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson, has died. He was 67.
NPR called him “A protean stylist who made a career of defying readers’ expectations, he crafted fiction, poetry and reportage that was often as unsparing as it was unconventional.”
The NYT writes that Johnson wrote with “extraordinary savagery and precision. He used his startling gift for language to create word pictures as detailed and visionary, and as varied, as paintings by Edward Hopper and Hieronymus Bosch, capturing the lives of outsiders — the lost, the dispossessed, the damned — with empathy and unsparing candor.”
In his heartfelt and quote filled appreciation, David L. Ulin, the former book critic of the Los Angeles Times, says “Denis Johnson ought to have been exempt. To write as he did, in this crucible of a world, it ought to be worth more than to die on Wednesday at 67, or perhaps to die at all. Think of the transcendent power of his sentences, the ruthless honesty, the unexpected turns.”
The New Yorker says of Johnson “He was an uneven writer, but even his most forgettable work throbbed with his irreducibly American voice, idiomatically vivid, veering between hardboiled banter and hyperacute physical and emotional immediacy—the banter often darkly comic, the description darkly ecstatic, observation so keen and compressed and so idiosyncratic that in bursts of just a few short sentences it could achieve a visionary quality.”
The Washington Post and New York Magazine offer appreciations as well.
His newest book, a reissue of his first two poetry collections, The Man Among the Seals & Inner Weather (UP New England/Carnegie Mellon) will be published this September.