Blank, shining

Thoughts about Denis Johnson's The Stars at Noon

I just finished The Stars at Noon, the last Denis Johnson book I hadn’t read. It’s always weird when you get to the end of a favorite’s oeuvre, the feeling that you’ve completed something important but it still won’t let you go yet. I’ve read Train Dreams a few times, Angels twice, Jesus’ Son more than I can count. The others I’ve settled for a single read so far and had varying reactions to all of them. I’m do for another read of The Largesse of the Sea Maiden soon. But more than anything, these books are a part of me, and his voice has been such a companion for the last twenty years of my life, it still feels like a loss. But I know I’ll be going back to them, time and time again, until I’m dead. Always experiencing something new there. It makes me feel like a very wealthy man, chosen to love this stuff. It’s strange. I don’t really even know what I’m talking about.

What do you want me to say about The Stars at Noon? I read it in three sittings, the first hundred pages on an airplane, the second at a bar waiting on a friend. Tonight I watched a couple of movies with friends at their apartment—The Lady Vanishes and Brief Encounter, both perfect in their own ways. Brief Encounter always wrecks me, so I figured I would come home and fix myself a drink and let the last bit of this book have its way with me.

There’s a story to this book, but not much in the way of plot. No rising action, no big release, none of that stuff. Just a kind of delirious careening through a lost world, our only guide a nameless woman with a perfect voice who is more lost than anyone else. A friend described it as not a thriller, but “an absolute noir,” and I get what she means. Doom is all over this thing. As in all the best noirs, even when you win you lose. Think the end of In a Lonely Place, or all that money blowing around the airstrip in The Killing. You know the feeling. No way out.

The book definitely presents as a noir. So many perfect lines, I could reproduce the whole thing for you: “Every day I was taken to a more terrible region and made to reproduce my error.” There you go. “Nothing so sad as the heart that cries, I can change! I can change!” That one gutted me. “‘One attempt, one gesture,’ he said. ‘Something to bring you back…It always comes up empty…You go on as always. As always…And then that one thing, that one attempt becomes a sort of ugly lump, doesn’t it. Almost a cancer. That act that was supposed to be good. The thing that was going to bring you back, it becomes an obscenity.’” Yes, yes, yes. Noir to the core.

But something else is at work in this book, something that won’t let me loose of it. Something that’s going to stay moving in me for a very long time.

I met Denis Johnson once. This was at grad school, in odd little Mississippi, where when big name writers showed up you got to meet them, because unlike New York, there were only about twenty people who actually cared. I’ve said this a million times, but the greatest thing about growing up so far outside of any “cultural center” was how much it mattered to love something. How it set you apart, gave you your friends, ordered your life for you. So few of us were making anything that we were bonded forever, if only for the indifference that often became hostility from everyone else. That’s a powerful feeing. You can make best friends that way. It also gives you the feeling that somehow all of this is noble, making your own art, that it matters just because it exists. That’s a beautiful feeling, and I think it’s a true one. Once I was digging through the unsorted archives in the Ole Miss library and came across a stray line Barry Hannah had handwritten on a piece of Millsaps College stationary: “This is to prove that I can make my own little fine art and those who despise it can meet me at dawn with tiretools.” That struck a nerve back then, and it still does now.

Anyway, Denis Johnson. Me and a couple of other students had lunch with him at a southern food staple on the square, Ajax Diner, to this day one of the greatest restaurants I’ve ever been to in my life. Most days I would cancel everything I am doing for one their veggie plates, the unhealthiest thing on the menu and enough food for two meals, running you less than $20. No one else seemed to want to say anything to Denis Johnson, and I was embarrassed to be at this sort of fake get-together the school had somehow roped him into. But he took the whole thing in stride, and he dealt with all of my endless questions. He was surprisingly candid, talking about raising his kids, struggling with addiction, difficulties with parenting, with money, with writing. I don’t think I’d ever had a writer whose work I so admired—I never looked at writers as moral guides, or as idols, or as anything more than breathing human beings that could do the thing I loved infinitely better than I could—be that open with me. It was a real thrill.

I remember asking him about Jesus’ Son, like I’m sure a thousand people had before, and he just laughed. “That book lingered, didn’t it?” he said. “More people ask me about that book than any of the others.” I kept at it, even though I knew what he’d said in interviews, I’d read them all. I wanted to hear it myself. “I don’t even remember writing that stuff. They were just stories I used to tell people. Too autobiographical, I thought. Then I got malaria and needed some money and figured I’d finally put those stories down. I went digging around and found seven of them in a drawer. I’d already written them.”

Then he lifted a straw upward and shot a toothpick into the ceiling.

What am I trying to say here? There’s always something redemptive in Denis Johnson’s work. Maybe not always, but there’s a tendency. Think the last paragraph of Jesus’ Son, the way Train Dreams lingers. You remember the apocalyptic hope. It tends to pop up. And it’s here in The Stars at Noon.

Our narrator—and I cannot stress this enough, I think she’s one of the best characters I’ve ever read, I just loved the mess of her so much—in a daze of despair and regret, wanders into an outdoor church, “six rows of benches facing a big, rude cross under a thatched roof…” She’s looking for some kind of comfort, a hand of mercy, but what she’s given is revelation:

“It’s not enough to observe. It’s never enough to observe suffering. With my eyes open I have to let that suffering pay for me. I have to confess, alone in these solitary places, unheard in the roaring rain, that the suffering of the afflicted pays for me. Either I’m Christ or I’m Judas: it’s kill or be killed…

Are you the Christ? One of us has to be…”

Revelation always comes like a punch in the throat. And it’s in this place of utter devastation, you get hope. A version of hope anyway, no matter how doomed. The door to hope is at least left open. It’s beautiful. Very un-noir, like he’d gone all the way to the end of the trope and found Christ there. Found himself there, needing Christ. Or the character had, anyway.

I don’t know, I loved it. Another book I will carry with me.