There may not be an official “canon” of Key West literature, but there’s certainly an appreciable body of work there. Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Thomas Sanchez’s Mile Zero, even John Hersey’s Key West Tales all possess a large degree of renown in this regard. Most American literary scholars could identify and place them within the Key West oeuvre.
There’s a much bigger canon of post-apocalyptic tales. Too many to even dip into without a thesis-length set of caveats, definitions, pivotal works, etc. But the late, great Denis Johnson penned one of the best. It’s also one of the best Key West novels, although in my experience it is rarely mentioned or remembered, even among those literary intelligentsia I referenced earlier.
Fiskadoro, Johnson’s second novel, was first published in 1985, during a particularly tense time for US-NATO-Western Bloc/Soviet-Warsaw Pact-Eastern Bloc relations. Consequently, it was also a particularly tense time regarding nuclear deterrence and Cold War anxiety. This informs the setting of Fiskadoro, which mainly follows three characters in their daily lives around Key West (renamed “Twicetown”, after two separate dud warheads failed to detonate on the island), some 60 years or so after a devastating nuclear war: the 13-year old titular character; his music teacher, Mr.Cheung, who desperately tries to glean any bits of info about the old world (and owns one of the two clarinets known to exist in the Keys); and Mr.Cheung’s grandmother, a 106-year old woman haunted by her escape from the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the harrowing lost-at-sea ordeal she endured afterwards. Mrs. Cheung is the only character with any solid memories of the pre-war world, but she is now infirm and has mostly lost the ability to speak.
There is a plot of sorts, but the pleasure of the novel (for me) derives from the speculative details of the setting that emerge from the characters’ actions and memories. It is unknown whether civilization exists anywhere else; the only communications Twicetown has with the outside world are cryptic radio transmissions ostensibly from Cuba. Deerfield Beach is the farthest north anyone on the island has ever traveled. Miami, in one of the novel’s more chilling scenes, is shown to be a scorched ruin, boulevards jammed with decaying cars, burnt skeletons at the steering wheels. The depictions of how language, commerce, culture, and lifestyles have changed since the war comprise the most plausible and convincing post-collapse portrayal of a surviving society.
Finally, within the ranks of Johnson’s own work, Fiskadoro is also sadly overlooked. Most readers know Jesus’ Son, and Tree of Smoke, and maybe Train Dreams – those were made into movies, or won prizes (or were prize-winning-adjacent). Fiskadoro, though, has no Wikipedia entry of its own. Its write-ups on Goodreads range from “meh” to cautious praise. Get out there and read this, even if you aren’t into Key West stories or apocalypse tales. It’s his best work, in my (humble) opinion. Mr.Cheung, lamenting his lack of connection to the pre-apocalypse world, stresses “the importance of remembering”; let’s remember this underrated novel from a late master as the brilliant leap of the imagination it is.
* Now that I think about it, Hersey’s Key West Tales probably deserves more renown/attention, too.
