Fiskadoro

...Flying Man, who is one of the Israelites living in a dismantled boat on the ocean side north of Twicetown (where Mr...

...It is, indeed, about the doomed human race, and has grandiose pretensions...

...Fiskadoro takes place about seventy-five years hence, at the time of what is called "the Quarantine," when the Florida Keys are all that remain of the United States...

...Park-Smith was a small black man who bleached his hair a rusty blond and referred to himself as an Australian.'' The beggars along the road are "people without arms, gangs of pinheads led by their insensate cousins, twisted-up people, the sightless and deaf, and creatures obliged to cover up their faces with rotting burlap, or muslin gone grey, so that nobody would have to see what terrifying portraits the genes could paint...

...The most mature character in the novel is A.T...

...Mi father es Jimmy Hidalgo . . . Fiskadoro es ain't a fish-man...

...For what distinguishes Fiskadoro, ultimately, is an original, visceral prose style that assaults the conventional bastions of naturalism and approaches the creation of a new form in fiction...

...The imagined events in this novel are absurdly sensational, and often savage...

...Yet the technique itself survives, as though, to borrow Yeats's metaphor, the dance survives the dancer...

...Cheung lives...

...My name Fiskadoro...

...Fiskadoro, which in Spanish means harpooner, is a young boy who speaks, like many in the novel, in a bumbling conglomeration of Spanish and English...

...The business of this novel, finally, is art itself...

...Fis-kadoro lives in a village of "wrecked quonset huts several miles east, a deteriorating shantytown once the dwelling place of sailors, and then marines, and still inhabited mainly by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and generally known as the Army...

...Fiskadoro ends up being genitally maimed by a group of swamp people who call themselves "Quraysh" and worship the incarnation of Mohammed in a two-headed snake...

...Cheung, manager of a bizarre pack of performers known as The Miami Symphony Orchestra...

...His grandmother, Marie Wright, the oldest living woman in the world, at one hundred, is unable to talk, and thus unable to tell Cheung about the lost days of photocopiers, cars, and consumerism...

...Marie believes that her own life spans the End of the World, which began in Saigon in 1974 when her father committed suicide and her mother went mad...

...And it is that very savagery of the human species, the impulse to do evil or whatever other name may be given to mankind's murderous instincts, that is the focus of Johnson's visionary work...

...Of course, this terrain has been explored before...

...There is no hope and no joy in this novel, and all of the author's considerable narrative skills have been used to emphasize the pointlessness of human survival...

...And there are others...

...But what makes Fiskadoro a literary achievement is not its intellectual framework...

...To start with, Johnson has given us an ingenious collage of poetic, often melodramatic, happenings and situations, peopled with eccentric, semi-articulate, deranged survivors of a nuclear holocaust...

...Yet, Johnson seems to ask, how could their fictitious brutality even begin to approach the inescapable facts of human brutality evidenced in wars, or even in peacetime...

...Westmoreland Wilson, Billy Chicago, Jimmy Hidalgo, Jake Barnes, and Atomic Bomber Major Colonel Overdose...

...There is Cassius Clay Sugar Ray, a half-brother to both Mr...

...The Keys are isolated from the rest of the world, and are inhabited largely by fishermen who troll the possibly contaminated waters of the southern Atlantic...

...Cheung and Park-Smith...

...Whether their pessimism is due to a personal crisis, to what they see as their immutable and involuntary membership in a doomed human race, to a feeling that the social class they represent is soon to become vestigial, or to the belief they are the abused orphans of an indifferent universe, is a matter for their critics to debate...

...Denis Johnson's second novel, Fiskadoro, carries heavy intellectual baggage with it on the way to the literary forum, and invites this kind of philosophical debate...

...And yet, the nihilism and cerebral meanderings in this novel are almost trompe I'oeil...

...rather, it is Johnson's ability to enhance fantasy with fact, to juxtapose realism and surrealism, to be able to place Marianne Moore's fabled "imaginary gardens with real toads in them...

...Cheung is a businessman who raises sugar cane in his garden, and is driven by a curiosity to understand the past...

...Some of the passages about Marie's evacuation from Saigon, incidentally, are among the most brilliant in the novel...

...Fiskadoro es only me...