Seek
by Denis Johnson
Harper Collins

These days all the weird, exciting writers live in the Northwest. Chuck Palahniuk, the angel-eyed boy next door responsible for nihilistic tomes like "Fight Club" and "Choke," resides in Portland, Ore. Thom Jones, boxer turned short-story writer, lives in Olympia, Wash. And Denis Johnson, chronicler of America's drug-addled and disaffected, lives in northern Idaho.

Of the three, Johnson is the most talented, and the most enigmatic. His stories, poems and novels follow an otherworldly narrative framework, his characters floating in and out of reality, effortlessly. He chronicles the lives of heroin addicts and con men and thugs so carefully it's difficult to think he didn't, at one time, do all those things himself. Johnson creates fictional worlds full of losers and outcasts.

Which is why "Seek" is such a frustrating work. The subtitle promises "reports from the edges of America and beyond," and that is literally the book's subject, the essays running from Alaska to West Africa to Central Asia. But what we expect — Johnson's knack for splaying a character for all to see, for exposing the precious vulnerabilities of even the most vile of social dregs — is nowhere to be found.

A number of the stories are dedicated to the American militia movement, ethnographies of the gun-toting nuts in Montana who declare themselves independent countries. But rather than tell us what such people are like, Johnson subjected the reader of "The Militia in Me" to 18 not-very-convincing pages about why he sympathizes with pro-NRA, pro-militia types. And while his perspective is original — how often do creative, world-knowledgeable folks align themselves with anti-government crazies? — Johnson's insight rarely gets beyond expositions such as:

I'm one among many, part of a disparate — sometimes better spelled "desperate" — people, self-centered, shortsighted, stubborn, sentimental, richer than anybody's ever been, trying to get along in the most cataclysmic century in human history. Many of us are troubled that somewhere, somehow, the system meant to keep us free has experienced a failure. A few believe that someone has committed the crime of sabotaging everything.

Failures need correction. Crimes cry out for punishment. Some ask: How do we fix it? Others: Who do we kill?

Johnson wants to say we're all possible militia sympathizers, but his lack of insight leaves his attempts at eye-opening commentary on the level of middling gee-whizzery.

Johnson improves with those essays dedicated to "beyond" — civil war in Liberia, hitchhiking in Somalia, flirting with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Here he interviews rebel leaders and bandits, crosses several borders illegally and has a generally good time getting himself into difficult situations. His observations reinforce the by-now hackneyed thesis that the Cold War's end has given birth to an anarchic world of bush wars and famines, ironically carried out with the AK-47s and Stinger missiles that fueled the U.S.-Soviet standoff. But even this point is often lost in Johnson's extreme self-referentiality. Despite writing several of the stories in third person, he manages to make each story into a dull personal narrative, somehow turning "The Small Boys' Unit," ostensibly about Liberia, into an excursus on his own frustrations with the life of a far-flung correspondent. Sadly, the only truly engrossing story is the first, "The Civil War in Hell," in which Johnson is completely absent.

Which is a shame, because so many of the people Johnson meets in the run-down hotels and forgotten plantations he frequents are truly interesting characters. But they are not Johnson-esque characters, and so perhaps they don't count as much. They have dreams and plans, ambitions that contradict not only Johnson's impression of the Third World but the "life is hell" impression of the world that runs through all his work.

The entire book, in fact, is a shame. Not a shame in that it's awful — despite its flaws, "Seek" is well-written and entertaining — but in that it has so much potential. Johnson's fiction is so good, his characters so crisp and interesting, that one expects the same in his reportage. To say this is not the case is not to condemn the author, but merely that he needs more practice.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)