Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson

First published: 1985

Type of work: Science fiction

Themes: Coming-of-age, nature, religion, sexual issues, social issues, and war

Time of work: The mid-twenty-first century

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: “Twicetown,” in the Florida Keys, once the site of Key West

Principal Characters:

• Fiskadoro Hidalgo, a thirteen-year-old boy, who is orphaned during the novel
• Jimmy Hidalgo, Fiskadoro’s sailor father
• Belinda Hidalgo, Fiskadoro’s mother
• A. T. Cheung, a cultured man of middle age
• Grandmother Wright, or
• Marie, a mute woman, who is more than one hundred years old
• William Park-Smith, a black half-brother to Cheung and also to Martin
• Martin, a drug-dealing pirate, who styles himself
• Cassius Sugar Ray
• Flying Man, a member of the tribe of blacks called Israelites, who is a friend of Cheung

The Story

InFiskadoro, a mysterious narrator introduces a story-within-a-story, promising a tale of “real” people. Presumably one of the invading force predicted at the book’s end, this speaker identifies the three main characters: A. T. Cheung, Grandmother Wright, and the boy Fiskadoro, cryptically referred to as “the only one who was ready when we came.”

Fiskadoro’s home, “Twicetown,” is so named for having twice escaped incineration when “dud” nuclear bombs failed to explode. Fiskadoro and his family live among fisherfolk, who survive by trading their catch for other necessities; in their miserable shanties, they listen to garbled news and old rock music on Cubaradio. Fiskadoro fantasizes about playing his clarinet along with rock musicians of the now-vanished world, legendary figures such as Jimi Hendrix. The tale opens as Fiskadoro seeks out Cheung, manager of a pathetic ragtag band of musicians grandiosely named the Miami Symphony Orchestra. Cheung promises to tutor the boy in music. Unhappily, Fiskadoro seems lacking in musical talent. Cheung persists in teaching him, hoping for a transformation, while Grandmother Wright witnesses the lessons in silence. Following a lesson, Fiskadoro observes on the road homeward the outcast mutants who are barred from the community.

After an all-night dancing session on the beach, Fiskadoro learns of his father’s drowning in an accident at sea. Cheung serves the bereaved boy an aromatic tea, which arouses in Grandmother Wright a dream vision of her girlhood in Saigon as Marie, the daughter of an English father and Chinese mother. The day of the evacuation of the American troops from Vietnam is also the day of her father’s suicide, for her, the beginning of the end of the world. She was forced to abandon her emotionally devastated mother in order to escape alive. The tale of her escape from Saigon is the most gripping passage in the novel: She brazenly fights her way onto the helicopter, then narrowly misses death by drowning when the overburdened aircraft crashes into the China Sea. The reader learns in flashbacks how she miraculously stayed afloat for days by grasping onto wreckage or floating corpses until finally rescued. Cheung tells Fiskadoro about the old woman’s history of loss, hoping she may provide a model for surviving grief.

Lonely and filled with frustrated sexual desires, Fiskadoro tracks a girl of the swamp people, or Quraysh. As he disappears from his home for months, he is thought to be dead. During his absence, Cheung and Park-Smith attend the Marathon Society for Knowledge, where they hear a reading of a factual account of the bombing of Nagasaki. The narrative shifts back and forth between the listeners’ vicarious experience of the devastation of the Japanese city and events in the shanty of Fiskadoro’s mother; the reader learns of Belinda’s breast cancer, her attempts to find a cure through voodoo medicine, and her desperate wish for Fiskadoro’s return.

Fiskadoro reappears at his home, much changed, a victim of amnesia. Hearing of his strange transformation into a man “not like other men,” Cheung and Park-Smith visit him, attended by Cassius Clay Sugar Ray, who believes Fiskadoro possesses information useful to drug trading. They find the young man and his mother in shock. Fiskadoro has survived an initiation rite among the Quraysh, who lured him into their camp as a replacement for a drowned youth of their tribe. Cassius Clay and Sammy, his bodyguard, describe the tribe’s rite of ritual subincision, vividly detailing how the boys are drugged, brainwashed, induced to maim themselves sexually, and left without memory. Strangely, Fiskadoro can now play the clarinet beautifully.

In the closing scene, Cheung and Fiskadoro provide music for the Israelites as they ceremonially usher in a new era: Flying Man explains the celebration by saying that “Babylon” is over and the time of the planet Israel has begun. Cheung has a flash of insight, seeing himself and Fiskadoro standing between two civilizations. He tells Fiskadoro he will be “a great leader,” for he is unburdened by memories. In the world after the bomb, memories are a liability; they endanger one’s sanity for it is “crazy” to remember the past and think it is real. In a quiet epiphany, Cheung accepts the cyclic nature of time. A mysterious floating shape on the horizon seems to be the harbinger of a new age, but the reader is left to imagine whether the transition will bring a Peaceable Kingdom or another Armageddon.

Context

Denis Johnson, a well-known poet, has published The Man Among the Seals (1969), Inner Weather (1976), The Incognito Lounge (1982), and The Veil (1987); he has also written other novels: Angels (1983) and The Stars at Noon (1986). Fiskadoro shows his persistent concern with the human yearning for spiritual transcendence, growth, and sexual fulfillment—all pressing needs of the maturing young adult. Fiskadoro exemplifies the survivor, often understood to be a hero by young people— despite his sufferings, he endures. Other science-fiction novels young readers can explore for comparisons and contrasts include Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (1959), Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (1980), Danger Quotient (1984) by Annabel and Edgar Johnson, and the Firebrat series by Barbara and Scott Siegel (The Burning Land, 1987; The Survivors, 1987; Thunder Mountain, 1987; and Shockwaves, 1988).

Fiskadoro is a strikingly original coming-of-age story, a haunting cautionary tale with appeal for the young adult seeking meaning in a world where the threat of nuclear catastrophe is a constant and history is held in little regard. The young person can learn much from Cheung, the exponent of historical memory, and from Grandmother Wright, whose personal experience provides an exceptional personal perspective on the horrors of war. Fiskadoro himself embodies the quest for meaning and aesthetic beauty in a blasted world. He and Grandmother Wright represent the ordinary folk who cannot articulate their own tragedies. Thus they can awaken the young adult’s awareness of the power of literature to explore what Nathaniel Hawthorne once called the sanctity of the human heart.

Bibliography

Brians, Paul. Review of Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42 (March, 1986): 50-53. In a discussion of several books that examine the threat or aftereffects of nuclear war, Brians praises Fiskadoro for its refusal to romanticize the “new primitive culture emerging out of the atomic ashes.” He notes the resurgence of interest in nuclear war fiction by “serious” contemporary writers and credits the “posture of the Reagan Administration” for producing such a strong response from writers who might not otherwise address the issue of nuclear war.

Corwin, Phillip. “Creating a New Form in Fiction.” Commonweal 112 (August 9, 1985): 444-445. Corwin considers Fiskadoro to be, despite its “grandiose pretensions,” one of the few works to rise up out of the doomed pessimism of most visionary novels. What distinguishes Fiskadoro is “an original, visceral prose style . . . that approaches the creation of a new form in fiction.” Johnson’s juxtaposition of the real and the surreal is judged to be the book’s lasting literary achievement.

Hoffman, Eva. “Postapocalypse Pastoral.” The New York Times Book Review 90 (May 26, 1985): 7. Hoffman’s review is a well-fashioned overview of a book that she believes “succeeds in everything but its subject.” Hoffman argues that the actual backdrop of the novel—the notion that nuclear Armageddon has occurred—is a subject “too overwhelming to be taken out of . . . historical context and serve as the pretext for allegory,” that the event itself casts too big a shadow over the otherwise subtle inventions that do in fact work within the author’s imaginings.

Johnson, Denis. “ From Somewhere Else’: An Interview with Denis Johnson.” Interview by Mark Hinson. Apalachee Quarterly 29/30 (1988): 100-107. In a rare interview, Johnson talks about the apocalyptic forces that lurk behind much of his work. “The whole point of Fiskadoro,” Johnson says, “is that every day is an apocalypse.” He admits that he is not wholly satisfied with Fiskadoro, which he says draws much of its energy from his childhood spent in Manila during the 1960’s.

Lenz, Millicent. “Danger Quotient: Fiskadoro, Ridley Walker, and the Failure of the Campbellian Monomyth.” In Science Fiction for Young Readers, C. W. Sullivan, editor. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. A perceptive study of the influence of Joseph Campbell’s thought on Johnson’s Fiskadoro. Lenz particularly focuses on the myth of the hero.

Neville, Jill. “Fiskadoro.” The Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1985, p. 573. Although Neville admits that Johnson is a writer of “prolific gifts,” she finds the novel to be problematic. “Johnson,” Neville says, “makes the reader flounder inside the strangeness of his apocalyptic vision. Too much is left unexplained.” What Neville considers to be “strangeness,” however, might to some readers be viewed as the wildly fertile imagination of an inventive and unpredictable writer.