It’s probably no accident that so many of Denis Johnson’s characters find themselves in cars heading to nowhere. The misfits and sinners that populate his stories are lost, sometimes physically, but most often emotionally. They’ve succumbed to their past, which usually didn’t set them on a good path, so they can only keep driving forward even if its going in the wrong direction. The enthralling part of Johnson’s writing is that no matter how appalling we find the characters, we understand and sympathize with this motley crew of addicts, bad husbands, deadbeats, and alcoholics. Mostly because Johnson is able to show the reader how much those nine-time losers resemble us.
From the opening story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” Denis Johnson ropes you in with his raw, stripped-to-the-bone prose. You feel as if Johnson has nervously gnawed down each of his lines, like a rough set of dirty fingernails, leaving pure and simple prose that can be ugly, beautiful, sick, and sad all in a single short sentence. Descriptions such as “I knew every raindrop by its name,” and “The blood ran off him in strings” knock you back with their ability to say so much with so little. Even when he gets more expansive, he makes every word count:
“Under Midwestern clouds like great grey brains we left the superhighway with a drifting sensation and entered Kansas City’s rush hour with a sensation of running aground.”
