Start with Jesus' son. Eleven linked stories, about 160 pages, narrated by an addict whose grip on sequence is unreliable and whose eye for the transcendent is not. It contains the most-quoted opening in late American fiction and at least three stories that people carry around for the rest of their lives. Nothing else Johnson wrote is this concentrated.
The obvious alternative is Tree of Smoke, the Vietnam novel that won the National Book Award, and starting there is a common and avoidable mistake. It is 700 pages, deliberately murky, and it withholds coherence as a structural principle — several major American critics loved it and several thought it a mess, which tells you something. Jesus' son costs you an evening and settles the question of whether you want the rest.
The early novels
Angels is the right second book. A woman on a Greyhound bus, a man who joins her, a drift toward an armed robbery in Arizona and its consequences. It is his first novel and the most conventionally plotted thing he wrote, which makes it the easiest doorway into the longer fiction, and the last quarter is as unsparing as anything in his catalogue.
Fiskadoro is post-apocalyptic Florida after a nuclear exchange, written in a degraded, half-invented English. Resuscitation of a Hanged Man follows a man arriving in Provincetown after a suicide attempt, taking a job and losing his grip on what he is investigating.
Both are worth reading and neither is where anyone should be third. They are the books where Johnson's interest in derangement outruns his interest in narrative, and readers who hit them early frequently give up on him.
The two long, difficult ones
Already Dead is a California noir of sorts, running to 400-plus pages, with a plot involving land, murder and a great deal of drug-addled metaphysics. It is the least defended book in the catalogue — even admirers tend to describe it as a magnificent failure — and it is entirely reasonable to skip.
Tree of Smoke is the serious one. Vietnam, a CIA colonel, his nephew, a Canadian nurse, and a war rendered as a fog that never lifts. The first 200 pages are the wall: characters appear and vanish, the chronology jumps by years, and you are given no reassurance that any of it will resolve. It largely does not resolve, and that is the point. If you get through the first quarter you will probably finish it and rate it highly. Plenty of good readers do not get through the first quarter, and that is not a failure of attention.
The late, short masterpieces
Train dreams is a hundred-page novella about a day labourer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century — railroads, a fire, a loss. It is the most perfect thing he wrote after Jesus' son and the single best argument for reading him if the drug material puts you off. Several readers start here instead, and that is a defensible choice.
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is his final book, five stories published after his death in 2017, mostly about men taking stock near the end. The title story and the last one are extraordinary. It is the right place to finish.
His poetry, collected as The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, and his plays are not in this path. The poems came first and the fiction reads differently once you know it — worth finding if he becomes important to you.
Where to stop
A complete short reading is three books: Jesus' son, Train dreams and The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. Four hundred pages total, three decades of work, and none of it padding. Add Angels if you want a full-length novel, and attempt Tree of Smoke only when you have decided you want the whole writer rather than the best of him.
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