![]() ![]() ![]() In Angels, “Death is the mother of all beauty,” a line from Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” is inscribed over a gas chamber in a New Mexico state penitentiary. Right away, we’re in trademark Johnson territory: the world as we know it, only not at all. and we’re halfway around the world, tagging along with Seaman Apprentice William Houston Jr.-the devil in Johnson’s first novel, Angels -as he wades just barely sober through the jungle of Grande Island, in the Philippines. Tree of Smoke begins in 1963 with the assassination of President Kennedy, only it’s 3 a.m. In fact, since the publication of his first novel, in 1983, he has been preoccupied with the paradoxical notions of self-sacrifice and salvation in our modern world-but never before has Johnson’s writing been quite so haunted and harrowing as it is in his massive new novel, twenty-five years in the works. What tends to get left out of most discussions of that book is that Johnson structured it loosely around the Stations of the Cross. ![]() Denis Johnson is best known for his slim novel-in-stories Jesus’ Son, which since its publication in 1992 has become something of a young writers’ how-to guide. ![]()
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