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Books<br>Easy Writer<br>On Ted Geltner’s ‘Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson’

Max Callimanopulos and The Metropolitan Review<br>Jun 02, 2026

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A scene from the film Jesus' Son, based on the Denis Johnson short story collection of the same name.<br>One of the most irritating things we learn in Ted Geltner’s new biography of Denis Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures, is just how easy it all was for Denis. Not that Denis’ life was easy — anyone who’s picked up Jesus’ Son is at least dimly aware that DJ blasted away his 20s careening between dope and booze before he got his act together — but the writing, if we’re to believe Geltner’s reverent account, came to him with blissful, galling ease. It began at the University of Iowa, where a 19-year-old Denis (“It was always Denis, not Denis Johnson,” Joy Williams insists) showed up to his freshman year seminar with a poem that left his classmates dumbfounded. “Nobody was able to manage any suggestions for improvement,” Geltner reports. Dejected, the class slinked off to “go listen to some Bob Dylan records.” Poor, defeated hippies. For the next seven years, as Denis muddled through an MFA, he routinely shocked professors into slack-jawed awe and drove students into paroxysms of envy with his immense and inexplicable talent. By 1974, “Well, it’s another Denis Johnson poem” had become a weary refrain around campus.<br>“Immediately,” “promptly,” and “quickly” are the adverbs that pepper Geltner’s breezy summary of Denis’ college years: Denis’ poems were “immediately” put on track for publication, and once that happened, Denis — restless and in search of further worlds to conquer — turned his attentions to Iowa’s fiction workshops. The first short story he ever wrote, “The Taking of Our Own Lives,” was “promptly” accepted by the North American Review. The next landed at The Atlantic and provoked Houghton Mifflin to “quickly” make Denis a deal for his not-yet-written debut novel. It’s enough to make the reader, who’s probably a writer, squirm with jealousy as they consider the drafts, rejections, “in-progress” submissions, fragments, jottings, and half-baked ideas clotting up their desk and their desktop.<br>That the audience for a Denis Johnson biography is likely to consist of writers themselves is obvious. It’s not that Denis can be comfortably labeled a “writer’s writer” (although Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures comes enthusiastically blurbed by Jenny Offill and T. C. Boyle, who claims, erroneously, that it’s a “biography with all the fluidity and thrust of a novel”), but that he, even more so than his mentor Raymond Carver, can be held responsible for the applications of at least several thousand young writers to MFA programs across America. The truth is that Denis wrote marvelously, and, crucially, he produced the kind of effortless prose that seemed imitable, the sort of writing that made one think, “Maybe I could do that.”<br>His formula was deceptively simple: take the minimalism and subject matter of Carver (“The Savoy Hotel was a bad place”), add a dash of Whitmanian lyricism (“I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth”), and presto, you had yourself a heartsick little gem like “Work” or “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” Of course, try to do this at home and you’ll find that it’s teeth-grindingly difficult work. So one cracks open Gestures determined to find answers. What made Denis tick? What was his routine? Was he a Balzacian, sustained by endless gallons of coffee, or did Denis draw his inspiration from some deeper interior well — heroin, followed by religion? We want to know how, exactly, he wrote those novels, and those stories, and those sentences. Reading about his life, we want a little of his power for ourselves.<br>It’s pointless to try and answer these questions — we’re almost better off knowing nothing about him — but Geltner sets himself to the task patiently. Denis left no instructions for a potential biographer before he died, so it’s up to Geltner, a professor of journalism at Valdosta State University, to track down the usual grab-bag of friends, lovers, ex-wives, colleagues, former instructors at the U of I, writing retreat buddies, barflies, gadflies, and hangers-on, all of whom seem as mystified by Denis as we are ourselves. The result of all this pavement-pounding is a diligent, respectful account of Denis Johnson’s life, from birth to death, addiction to sobriety, and obscurity to (sadly truncated) literary fame. Relevant interviewees are quoted throughout, appropriate historical context is provided, but ultimately Gestures is long on detail, short on insight, and although a tone of quiet worship is struck throughout, one finishes the book with the strong sense that Denis would not have wanted it written.<br>If the writing came naturally to Denis, it was the business of living that he was ill-suited for. “I can’t remember very many situations,” he...