Two Men

John Updike compared Johnson's writing to the Jayne Anne Phillips of Black Tickets, Thom Jones, Raymond Carver (who taught Johnson at the University of Iowa in 1969), and "the gleaming economy and aggressive minimalism of early Hemingway." Sometimes Johnson also invokes the phantasmagorically twisted realism of William Burroughs. He writes of a drug hotel in "Dirty Wedding": "The reality of it gave out as it rose higher above First Avenue, so that the upper floors dribbled away into space. Monsters were dragging themselves up the stairs." In "Steady Hands at Seattle General", we could be in Interzone when apparently innocent objects like vases, beds and ashtrays appear "wet and scary, hardly bothering to cover up their true meanings".