“But at this hour it was still cool — in their hands some of these people cradled styrofoam cups of steam.”
Denis Johnson writes such good sentences that it’s almost a defect. He is, in other words, a poet-turned-novelist — a breed of which I’m naturally wary. Martin Amis wrote somewhere or other that when he’s reading he makes check marks in the margins beside especially fine sentences, and that for him the dream novel would have unbroken columns of checks up and down every page. The thought of this dream-novel has always made me a bit queasy — like thinking of eating a chocolate chip cookie that is nothing but an oozing slab of melted chocolate, without the spaciousness-granting stretches of plain and necessary dough.
Denis Johnson is an unparalleled chocolatier, but he is also the maker of some awfully good dough, and this sentence (from the last pages of his first novel, Angels) captures him in a moment of perfect balance. The context is: there’s about to be an execution at a prison in Arizona, and across the highway from the prison, a ghoulish assemblage of onlookers — media, motorcyclists, families — has formed. These are the people who are cradling “styrofoam cups of steam.” And those four words, in addition to forming a lovely mental image in their own right, create a micro-portrait of Denis Johnson as a writer. He is superhumanly attuned to beauty, to strangeness, to all that hovers just on the edge of expressibility — to steam. And yet he is hilariously informed and articulate about all that is grubby and false and ridiculous — styrofoam. He writes about the track marks of drug addicts and the interior smells of Greyhound buses but he doesn’t rub our noses in grit. He writes about moments of true beauty and self-transcendence but he doesn’t forget that these things happen mere inches from the armpits and expired AAA-cards of those who are experiencing them.
This perceptual ambidextrousness accounts, I think, for the near-religious reverence in which many writers hold Johnson, and also the sense of sacredness that hovers over much of his work (see, for instance, his titles: Angels, Jesus’ Son). A view that can see the goodness in a drug-addicted murderer is fundamentally holy. A voice that treats prison cells — not to mention psych wards and highway overpasses and public bathrooms — as being no less worthy of loving, fresh description than the steeples of churches is, something in us knows, a voice in tune with God (or whatever fills the God-shaped-space in our vocabularies). Johnson awakens the thing in us that, when we’re stuck on the most maddening, interminable customer service call with Verizon, nevertheless notices the mourning doves cooing outside the window. And that thing is good.