Denis Johnson, Undead

With a new, posthumous book, the author of Jesus’ Son still haunts the culture, for good reason.

- Christian Lorentzen

HOW MANY READERS of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son have wondered what happens to Fuckhead when he grows up? Johnson’s 1991 masterpiece—a lean and quivering book of 11 linked stories told by a barfly, a junkie, and a petty criminal whose voice is somehow older and wiser than his years—ends with Fuckhead sobered up and working at a home for the aged, demented, amputated, and otherwise infirm. He spends his days among the unwell who nobody else ever sees. His duties include making the patients feel human, touching them once in a while so they know they’re not lepers: “All these weirdos,” the book ends, “and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

A tempting answer to the question of what happened to Fuckhead is that he became his author, who died on May 24, 2017, at age 67, of liver cancer. Sometimes the biographical fallacy isn’t a fallacy, and we know that Johnson spent a lot of his 20s in a haze of alcohol, heroin, and whatever else came his way. He quit drinking in 1978, at age 29, and his first novel, Angels, appeared in 1983. By the time of his death, he was the author of 19 books of fiction, plays, poetry, and reportage—one of which, the Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke, won the National Book Award in 2007. He’s called a writer’s writer, but his audience is in fact legion. There are people walking around who know his books by heart. You probably know somebody like that.