Denis Johnson. (2014). The Laughing Monsters: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Denis Johnson. 2014. The Laughing Monsters: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Denis Johnson, The Laughing Monsters: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Denis Johnson. The Laughing Monsters: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

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1. • value: literary fiction
2. • value: Espionage Thrillers
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26. • value: sierra leone fiction
27. • value: uganda fiction

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Johnson, Denis
   • bioText: Denis Johnson (1949–2017) is the author of eight novels, one novella, one book of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His novel Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award.
   • name: Denis Johnson

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Denis Johnson's New York Times bestseller, The Laughing Monsters, is a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game.
Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country's civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless.
Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He's probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago.
Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at the back of it all, Adriko's stated reason for inviting his friend to Freetown is for Nair to meet Adriko's fiancée, a grad student from Colorado named Davidia. Together the three set out to visit Adriko's clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland—but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Nair, Adriko, and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
   • content:

     "Johnson's tenth novel is a stunner: the story of Roland Nair, a rogue intelligence agent looking to make a big score in Sierra Leone amid the detritus and chaos of the post-war-on-terrorism world. Johnson's sentences are always brilliant, but it is in the interstices, the gray areas of the story, that he really excels."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Boris Kachka, New York Magazine
   • content: "A thriller of spies and black marketeers that's hard to put down for all the right reasons."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Justin Taylor, Bookforum
   • content: "Easy to love line by line--Denis Johnson's prose, as always, is incandescent . . . [a] hermetic, exhilirating, visionary nightmare of a book."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Joy Williams, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "The single catastrophe is what fuels that demands and mysteries of literature. The wreckage is what essential writers particularize, and Denis Johnson's interests have always beenin wreckage, both individual and universal. If Train Dreams (a Pulitizer finalist) dealt with the dignified tragedy of a past American antonym, The Laughing Monsters addresses the vanishing present, a giddy trickle-down of global exploitation and hubris--the farcical exploits of cold dudes in a hard land."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     July 7, 2014
     Best known for writing about Vietnam (Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award) and America’s dispossessed (Jesus’ Son; Angels), Johnson sets his new literary spy thriller in Africa. Roland Nair, a Scandinavian with a U.S. passport, returns to the continent where he once made a fortune when his longtime friend Michael Adriko invites him to Freetown, Sierra Leone. The stated reason is to attend Michael’s wedding to his newest fiancée, Davidia, but because both Roland and Michael have spent their lives working for various government and military organizations, Roland has reason to suspect that Michael has a hidden agenda. Soon Roland, Michael, and Davidia are traveling deeper and deeper into Africa, their destination a mystical place called Newada Mountain in the Congo: Michael, a war orphan, remembers it from his chaotic, violent childhood. NATO, the U.N., Mossad, and Interpol get wrapped up in his dangerous plan. Much of the novel follows the shifting military and political loyalties in a post-9/11 world, and there is plenty of subterfuge and secrecy, but Johnson’s at his best when describing the pervasive, threatening strangeness of Roland’s life in Africa. Huge insects, dangerous bogs, something called “Baboon Whiskey,” a dining room that only plays Nat King Cole’s “Smile” over and over, and even, toward the end, some effective nods to Heart of Darkness all help to make the book’s setting its strongest character.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 1, 2014
     And for his next trick, Johnson delivers a taut, Conrad-by-way-of-Chandler tale about a spy who gets too close to the man he's shadowing in Africa. Johnson may be the hardest major American writer to pin down: He's written potent short stories about down and outers (Jesus' Son, 1992), a ruminative domestic novel (The Name of the World, 2000), a hefty Vietnam epic (Tree of Smoke, 2007) and a hard-boiled noir (Nobody Move, 2009). With this novel, narrated by a seen-it-all NATO agent, Johnson revisits some of the itches previously scratched in Tree of Smoke, particularly the moral compromises that are inextricably linked to war and spycraft. Roland arrives in West Africa with orders to connect with Michael Adriko, a former anti-terrorist colleague who's apparently deserted. Roland is no exemplar of moral upstanding himself: In Sierra Leone, he cuts a side deal to sell NATO secrets, self-medicates with alcohol and prostitutes, and once he finally connects with Michael, falls for Michael's fiancee, Davidia. Michael wants Roland to join him in a scheme to sell a chunk of unprocessed radioactive material, a plan that takes them deeper into the continent, to Michael's hometown in the Congo. (The novel's title refers to a mountain range there.) As in any good double-agent story, Johnson obscures whose side Roland is really on, and Roland himself hardly knows the answer either: Befogged by frustrations with bureaucracy, his lust for Davidia and simple greed, he slips deeper into violence and disconnection. Johnson expertly maintains the heart-of-darkness mood, captured in Roland's narration as well as in the increasingly emotional messages he sends to his lover and colleague back home.Johnson offers no new lessons about how dehumanizing post-9/11 lawlessness can be, but his antihero's story is an intriguing metaphor for it.

     COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     September 15, 2014
     Johnson's latest offers more proof of the range and impressive talent of one of America's finest novelists, although this is far from his best book. After his brilliant early work, Johnson has in recent years taken on Vietnam (Tree of Smoke, 2007) and the underside (his specialty) of the American West (Train Dreams, 2011). Here we are in contemporary Africa, from Freetown (Sierra Leone) to Uganda, an unsettling continent, with two unsettling but fascinating major characters: Roland Nair, a part-Danish operative for an uncertain international organization, and Michael Adriko, a secretive, charismatic, and frighteningly capable African of otherwise questionable ancestry and motivation. Michael's well-educated American fianc'e, Davidia, and a cast of shady characters of diverse lineage contribute to what is very much a twenty-first-century stew, despite its clear similarity to the work of Graham Greene or even Joseph Conrad. As one character says, Since nine-eleven, chasing myths and fairy tales has turned into a serious business. Though what business that is remains murky, Johnson's manipulation of its elements is testimony to his mature power as a writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from September 15, 2014
     

     Roland Nair is a NATO intelligence operative assigned to report on his old comrade-in-arms Michael Adriko after Michael, currently an attache with a Green Beret unit in the Congo, mysteriously summons him to Africa. Arriving in Sierra Leone, Roland soon hooks up with Michael and his fiancee, Davidia St Claire, an American college girl and daughter of Michael's commanding officer. Michael wants Roland to accompany him to his home village to get his clan's blessing to marry Davidia and to participate in scamming Mossad about a flight load of highly enriched uranium rumored to have disappeared in a plane crash many years earlier. Their adventures take them from the Congo and capture by American special forces to the crazed remnants of Michael's clan and finally back to Sierra Leone, where Roland has his own bit of illegal business to transact. VERDICT In a work that's part spy novel and part buddy tale, Johnson aptly locates his portrayal of a shadowy world of complicated relationships and ever-shifting alliances in one of the more broken places on the planet. This is what you might get if you combined Casablanca's cynicism and sense of intrigue with a touch of Heart of Darkness post-9/11. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/14.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

     Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     June 1, 2014
     

     The National Book Award-winning author of Tree of Smoke can be expected to deliver literate and insightful suspense as Roland Nair returns after ten years to Sierra Leone, where he had made a lot of money with his friend Michael Adriko. Michael, who calls himself a soldier of fortune, introduces Roland to his American fiancee, and together they travel to the Uganda-Congo borderland to meet Michael's clan. Not surprisingly, this trip reveals dark secrets and divided loyalties in a fractured post-9/11 world.

     Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

10. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 15, 2014
      

      Roland Nair is a NATO intelligence operative assigned to report on his old comrade-in-arms Michael Adriko after Michael, currently an attache with a Green Beret unit in the Congo, mysteriously summons him to Africa. Arriving in Sierra Leone, Roland soon hooks up with Michael and his fiancee, Davidia St Claire, an American college girl and daughter of Michael's commanding officer. Michael wants Roland to accompany him to his home village to get his clan's blessing to marry Davidia and to participate in scamming Mossad about a flight load of highly enriched uranium rumored to have disappeared in a plane crash many years earlier. Their adventures take them from the Congo and capture by American special forces to the crazed remnants of Michael's clan and finally back to Sierra Leone, where Roland has his own bit of illegal business to transact. VERDICT In a work that's part spy novel and part buddy tale, Johnson aptly locates his portrayal of a shadowy world of complicated relationships and ever-shifting alliances in one of the more broken places on the planet. This is what you might get if you combined Casablanca's cynicism and sense of intrigue with a touch of Heart of Darkness post-9/11. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/14.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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Denis Johnson's New York Times bestseller, The Laughing Monsters, is a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game.
Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country's civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless.
Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He's probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago.
Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at...

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