Short and bitter-sweet

The death of Denis Johnson last May marked the loss of a great original who catalogued the lives of junkies, social misfits and minor criminals from an insider’s perspective — which is not surprising, considering his own history of drug and alcohol abuse. Certainly his most celebrated work, the hilarious yet profoundly moving story collection, Jesus’ Son, reinforced that image, offering us characters like the narrator of ‘Steady Hands at Seattle General’, who can, in all seriousness, ask a man with a recent gunshot wound: ‘When you were shot right through your face like that, did the bullet go on to do anything interesting?’ (The other replies, ‘How would I know? I didn’t take notes.’)

Elsewhere — in the National Book Award-winning novel Tree of Smoke, for instance — Johnson can describe a character thus: ‘She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.’