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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