Work by Denis Johnson

Copper wires can fetch a pretty penny. 

I haven’t come across many writers who can do what Denis Johnson does: write about deeply flawed, often pretty ugly people and still treat them with real empathy. His characters are drug addicts, alcoholics, abusers. Not exactly the kind of people you are eager to root for and Work doesn’t ease you in gently. It opens with the narrator shooting up heroin in a hotel room with his girlfriend, getting into an argument, punching her in the stomach, then hopping on a bus and running away like a complete coward. A real charmer.

He eventually ends up at the local bar where he runs into an old friend named Wayne. The two of them decide the best way to make some quick cash is to rip copper wiring out of the walls of abandoned houses. That’s basically the plot and yet Johnson makes it feel full and alive. The prose has this steady, natural rhythm that’s almost poetic, even as it wades through some very bleak territory. The narrator is stuck in an endless loop of addiction, loneliness, guilt, regret, and despair. Johnson never excuses his behavior, but he also never flattens him into a monster. You are left feeling the weight of his damage without being told what to think.

There are two moments in the story that really stuck with me because they feel so strange and jarring, almost out of sync with everything else. The first is when the two men see a naked woman parasailing at night along the river near the abandoned houses. Is it a drug-induced hallucination? Something symbolic? Something real? Johnson leaves it deliberately unclear. That kind of ambiguity is a hallmark of his work. He trusts the reader to sit with uncertainty and draw their own conclusions.

The second moment is the final paragraph, which hit me like a ton of bricks. It comes out of nowhere and almost feels misplaced at first. The narrator recalls a painful childhood memory of his mother being abused by his father. It’s written in such a plain, direct, unadorned way that it’s devastating. In a few short lines, Johnson quietly opens a door into the narrator’s past and hints at the trauma underneath everything we have just witnessed.

Incredible stuff.