The year was 1988, and Denis Johnson was at a low point. He caught malaria on a reporting trip into the jungles of the Philippines and was nearly pronounced dead. The disease left him unable to write. His second wife left him. He didn’t have enough money to pay his taxes. His publisher was waiting for a book that he hadn’t started. But in the life of Denis Johnson, when things were at their bleakest, something good was usually waiting around the next corner. This time, what emerged from the chaos was his masterpiece Jesus’ Son, a book that would tap into the zeitgeist of the 1990s and become a bible for Generation X and an American classic.
Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures tells the complete story of Johnson’s fascinating life, his thrill-seeking trips into war zones as a magazine correspondent, his battles with addiction, his live-it-before-you-write-it style of fiction. It follows the arc of his tremendous body of work as a novelist, journalist, poet, and playwright, and in the process recovers the true stories from the hazy myths that one of our most beloved, yet enigmatic, writers left behind.
About the Author :
Ted Geltner is professor of journalism at Valdosta State University. He is author of Blood, Bone, and Marrow: A Biography of Harry Crews. His journalism has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Review :
“A biography with all the fluidity and thrust of a novel. Ted Geltner definitively illuminates the tirelessly questing life of one of the most gifted, mysterious, and lyrical writers of our time. Denis Johnson was an utterly unique generational talent, and in these pages his inspiration and devotion to craft shine through brilliantly.”—T. C. Boyle, author, Blue Skies
“Brian Eno once said that the Velvet Underground only sold a few thousand records, but everyone who heard them went out and formed a band. Denis Johnson is the equivalent for writers. He opened the door to strange, new territories of disaster and desire and we all streamed in after him, hoping to learn a little. In this intimate and deeply engaging biography, Ted Geltner makes the legend and the man behind it come alive.”—Jenny Offill, author, Weather
“Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures . . . a biography that has a rightful claim as the first real accounting of Johnson’s life . . . shines an uncomfortably bright spotlight on an author who often chose to remain half in the shadow. Geltner’s reporting demystifies the troubled period of Johnson’s life that shaped Jesus’ Son and leaves the reader with, among other things, a set of damning facts. . . . The feat of Geltner’s biography is, for the first time in print, untangling the complicated details of the first half of Johnson’s life. Geltner’s work exemplifies the old-school tools of journalism: newspaper archives, cold calls, police reports, knocking on doors. One can imagine certain facts dug up from long lost connections surprising even Johnson, were he alive to read them.”—Wyatt Williams, The New York Times
“Geltner’s detailed reporting makes the book both compelling and essential to future work on Johnson.”—Chicago Review of Books
“The most valuable parts of Geltner’s book for me are where he traces Johnson’s influences. . . . As to Johnson’s impact on others, it is difficult to overstate. He’s become a gateway writer the way Bukowski or Philip K. Dick or Vonnegut were and continue to be. A kind of shortcut to an all-encompassing literary universe. . . . Whatever his human shortfalls, Geltner’s book convincingly makes the case for this writer as worthy of inclusion in whatever the canon of literature may now be.”—Zona Motel
