I purchased this copy of Fiskadoro from an independent bookstore in Brooklyn. I had this habit of finding random indie bookstores on lazy weekend walks and checking out their selections, and, if they had something good enough, and I have enough spending money (rarely), I would buy something. I did this in Sacramento, in my college town of SLO, in Brooklyn, and even in Austin.
Denis Johnson is one of my favorite writers; his collection of short pieces called Jesus' Son is a modern masterpiece of the art form, and he's one of the rare writers hailed in his own time by his peers. Maybe his most famous work is Tree of Smoke, a prestigious National Book Award winner about Vietnam. My father believes it'll go down as probably the novel about Vietnam.
Fiskadoro is an early novel by the writer, and you can tell it's an early novel. It takes place after an apocalyptic crash of civilization out on the rather isolated Florida Keys. The mainland they tend to call the wasteland and is avoided by decree. Reading it you try to surmise just how long it's been: there's a music teacher and a semblance of musical or symphonic gang, a group determined to keep some shred of culture alive, while other social moors are rather tossed away, like when women reach a certain age they cease wearing shirts.
There's also a strange group of people living on the island who are called the shadow people, or something, but they're not part of the "normals" world. They're known to take young men and do things to them, to their dicks. This group seems like legends used to scare the kids, until the main character is nabbed and operated upon.
I grabbed the book just now to thumb through to get an idea of the name of the "others", and I realized I can't remember a whole lot of what I was looking at. So take what I've said with a grain of salt. This has been pretty much what I've taken from the story after a five years and a few beers.
I do remember the mother and the matriarch, who aren't the same person. The "mother" is the mother of the main character, and as her kids are now older and she's found a "pebble" in one of her boobs, she finally decides to drop the shirt wearing act. For this she's reminded by another with a laugh that it easily could have been done earlier.
The matriarch of the settlement, grandma, is the oldest person in the story, and has the most recollections of the world before the fall. in a long flashback section we see the real story that Denis Johnson wants to tell; it's a scene from Vietnam.
The grandma character has vivid memories of being a nurse on a fleeing helicopter as it was downed in the Gulf of Tonkin and getting rescued. This character, as a young lady, is very similar to a character from Tree of Smoke, and having read both, and Fiskadoro second, the connection--from my own writer's perspective--in undeniable. The woman doesn't have to be the exact same lady, but the fact that they look the same and act the same shows what's going on in the head of a word artist.
For those who know the following reference, this is similar to, but not as obviously directly used in a different manner, the Porpentine and Goodfellow story "Under the Rose" from Pynchon's short story collection Slow Learner and how it was later utilized in V.. That novel did come out first, and when the collection of stories came out readers and fans were able to see how that material morphed into scenes for V., but started as something slightly different, and here, in a different venue, consist of a story. Almost like a missing scene, or something that adds to the canon.
V....I can't think of any writer's first novel being as......maybe the best novel ever written by a teenage girl, also a first novel, but became more of cultural touchstone than anything Pynchon ever wrote could be in a similar category (I'm talking about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein).
Digressions. Fiskadoro is a good look at a writer growing and using something like a post apocalyptic world--typically a sci-fi or fantasy trope--as a setting for some wacky literature. Check it out if either opf those things interest you; watching authors mature or weird shenanigans on the post-apoc Keys.
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