Welcome to the jungle

At the end of Denis Johnson's 1983 novel, "Angels," a drifter named Bill Houston is led to the Arizona gas chamber, where he will die for having murdered a bank guard in a botched robbery. Bill is ex-Navy, a former sailor who never quite fit back into the civilian world. And yet, Johnson wants us to realize, even an existence this marginal comes bestowed with its own odd sort of grace.

"He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it," Johnson writes. "But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of these things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come. That's it. That's the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being."

Bill is, in many ways, a quintessential Johnson figure, a three-dimensional embodiment of the tension that animates nearly all the author's writing: the tricky pull between the spiritual and the physical, the sacred and the profane. He's not bad at heart, not exactly; perhaps a more accurate way of putting it is that standard considerations of good and evil do not apply.

For Johnson, the key is to think in terms of redemption, resurrection even, to look for the small flickers of awareness or transcendence that pierce the illusory distractions of the world. This is not the stuff of homilies, of easy faith or of a forgiving, tender-hearted god. "What a pair of lungs!" Johnson's visionary (or is he only drug-afflicted?) narrator exclaims, describing a woman's wail of grief in his best known (and, I think, finest) book, the 1992 story collection "Jesus' Son." "She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere."

This is writing that takes us right up to the edge and, indeed, beyond it, that casts us past the boundaries of ourselves. It's no coincidence that in Johnson's 1997 novel "Already Dead" (subtitled "A California Gothic"), a character named Carl Van Ness becomes convinced that his failed suicide attempts are actually successful; he is not so much surviving as cycling through a series of parallel lifetimes, parallel souls.