Badlands

Denis Johnson's nonfiction dispatches

by John Freeman

In his seven works of fiction, Denis Johnson has invented a universe peopled by souls clinging to society's ragged edges -- drunks, junkies, and blighted men and women too hopped-up or drugged-out to contemplate the wrecks of their own lives. It should come as no surprise that the writer behind these bleak tales pursues the most dangerous and bizarre experiences in the real world. In Seek, Johnson collects dispatches from his career as a journalist over the past 10 years -- reports on revolutions in West Africa, a smattering of reminiscences, and a few essays on America's lunatic fringe -- to produce an evocative snapshot of life on the border of bliss and despair.

Part travelogue, part memoir, Seek journeys from the most remote reaches of Alaska to a Bikers for Jesus Rally in Texas to the desert of Somalia in the wake of America's disastrous involvement there. In the opening piece, "The Civil War," the Idaho native plunges into the aftermath of Liberia's ongoing bloody conflict. As he drifts through the streets, "the sound of gunfire is more or less constant . . . the rattling of weaponry sounds too close too often. . . . The beach down the hill still stinks of death, though most of the corpses have been covered with sand and marked with driftwood."

Showing a keen ear for the ways in which people speak, Johnson modulates the cadence of his prose to suit his subject. The style of "Down Hard Six Times," an essay on his abortive attempt to mine for gold in the Alaskan wilderness while on honeymoon, is hard-edged, muscular, yet tart with irony. In "Three Deserts," a riff on three arid landscapes, his sentences are dry and uninflected in tone, yet rich in descriptive texture.

Johnson inserts himself into the mix, and he's aware of his complicity in the events he observes. In "Hippies," he depicts a 10,000-person Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes in Oregon while tripping on mushrooms. As dewy-eyed teenagers and aging beatniks share love and drugs, he steals an extra portion of hallucinogens from a friend. When an actual rainbow arcs through the sky, he can't enjoy the moment because the drugs have worn off: "I'm thinking, all through this spectacle, that I should have saved a couple of buttons for today, I should be high to dig this."

Like William T. Vollmann, Johnson has an almost pathological need to put himself in harm's way. Seek's best pieces capture the hysteria and lawlessness of Africa in the throes of change. In "The Small Boys' Unit," the book's virtuoso masterpiece, Johnson enters war-torn Liberia with $4000 sewn into his pant seams and a New Yorker press pass. Having been conveyed from one armed driver to the next, shot at and threatened, he witnesses something that galvanizes him into action. Just before meeting Liberian president Charles Taylor, he encounters an alleged fighter pilot who has been tortured. The man's legs are broken, his lips are split, his skin is "shiny and yellowish, rupturing in places like a rind." Johnson slowly removes his press pass and hangs it around the man's neck like a sacrament, "loudly and clearly saying his name and saying my name and the name of the magazine and the name of the United States of America: that the magic from these names would stand around him against his misfortunes."

It's a cathartic gesture from a writer who, in Angels and Jesus' Son, glamorized degradation as he explored it. Johnson's fiction reveals an intimate understanding of the burdens of carnal vulnerability. In that sense, Seek can be read as a writer's notebook as he insatiably gathers material. If there is one theme that unifies his nonfiction, it's his feverish desire to immerse himself in extreme human experiences. And many of Seek's vignettes revolve around the lengths to which Johnson will go to track down a story. Like fellow writers Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bowden, he is obsessed with authenticity: the more peril the experience promises, the better. His gonzo swagger, though, upstages his storytelling, a pose that is seductive in individual essays but grows tiresome as the book carries on. What kept me turning the pages was Johnson's nervy, inimitable voice, one that provokes us to engage with the wider world.