Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7583 in Books
• Published on: 1993-12-15
• Released on: 1993-12-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Amazon.com Review
The unnamed narrator in Jesus' Son lives through a car wreck and a heroin overdose. Is he blessed? He cheats, lies, steals--but possesses a child's (or a mystic's) uncanny way of expressing the bare essence of things around him. In its own strange and luminous way, this linked collection of short fiction does the same. The stories follow characters who are seemingly marginalized beyond hope, drifting through a narcotic haze of ennui, failed relationships, and petty crime. In "Dundun" the narrator decides to take a shooting victim to the hospital, though not for the usual reasons: "I wanted to be the one who saw it through and got McInnes to the doctor without a wreck. People would talk about it, and I hoped I would be liked." Later he takes his own pathetic stab at violence in "The Other Man," attempting to avenge a drug rip-off but succeeding only at terrorizing an innocent family. Each meandering story--some utterly lacking in the usual elements of plot, including a beginning and an end--nonetheless demands compulsive reading, with Denis Johnson's first calling as a poet apparent in the off-kilter beauty of his prose. Open to any page and gems spill forth: "I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside that we'd have an accident in the storm."

The most successful stories in the collection offer moments of startling clarity. In "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," for instance, the narrator feels most alive while in the presence of another's loss: "Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead.... What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere." In "Work," while "salvaging" copper wire from a flooded house to fund their habits, the narrator and an acquaintance stop to watch the nearly unfathomable sight of a beautiful, naked woman paragliding up the river. Later the narrator learns that the house once belonged to his down-and-out accomplice and that the woman is his estranged wife. "As nearly as I could tell, I'd wandered into some sort of dream that Wayne was having about his wife, and his house," he reasons. Such is the experience for the reader. More Genet than Bukowski, Denis Johnson lures us into a misfit soul's dream from which he can't awake. --Langdon Cook

From Publishers Weekly
Taking its title from a line in Lou Reed's notorious song "Heroin," this story collection by with-it novelist Johnson focuses on the familiar themes of addiction and recovery. In his novels ( Angels ; Resuscitation of a Hanged Man ) Johnson has shown his ability to transform the commonplace into the extraordinary, but this volume of 11 stories is no better than, and often seems inferior to, the self-destruction/spiritual rehab books currently crowding bookstore shelves. All of the tales, set in the Midwest and West, are told by a single narrator, and while this should provide unity and depth, instead it makes the stories fragmentary and monotonous. Some disturbing moments do recall Johnson at his inventive best, as when a peeping Tom catches sight of a Mennonite man washing his wife's feet after a marital spat in "Beverly Home," or when the narrator 'fesses up to his fright in a confrontation with the boyfriend--"a mean, skinny, intelligent man who I happened to feel inferior to"--of a woman he's fondling in "Two Men." But for the most part the stories are neurasthenic, as though Johnson hopes the shock value of characters fatally overdosing in the presence of lovers and friends will substitute for creativity and hard work from him. Even the dialogue for the most part lacks Johnson's usual energy.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Set in the Midwest and West, these aggressively grim stories are linked by a common narrator--a young, nameless substance abuser of unspecified background and education. Like the other marginal and directionless individuals who populate these tales, he is locked into a downward spiral of booze, drugs, and petty crime, the squalor of his life emblematic of a more profound spiritual malaise. The best pieces--like "Beverly Home," which concerns a recovering addict who spies on a Mennonite couple through their bedroom window, and "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," which is exactly what the title implies--balance longing with despair, revealing the yearning for a kind of meaning ultimately lost to these lives. Johnson writes with hallucinatory brilliance, giving these stories a nightmarish edge. Bleak and disturbing, they are not for the faint-hearted.
- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

OK, but not as good as i had heard
I had heard that this was some seminal work in the history of literature. Maybe that's because i was living in Iowa City at the time, or maybe some people just like stories of guys getting F'd up. I for one wasn't very satisfied. It read like a million little pieces if written by a junior high student.

Children of loneness
In Denis Johnson's stunning collection of short stories "Jesus' Son", there is an image that stays with you most of the time. This is the picture of loneness and desolation. In one of the best tales, called "Emergency", the main character whose name goes by FH and a friend drive through the country. They eventually find a drive-in. But the weather is awful and there is no one in there - even though there is a movie being played. Johnson's description of this place is the combination of beauty and sadness.

Since the writer has a natural ability to construct both metaphors and harrowing images the scene is depressive and, at the same time, powerful, uplifting. "Famous movie stars rode bicycles beside a river, laughing out their gigantic, lovely mouths. If anybody had come to see this show, they'd left when the weather started. Not one car remained, not even a broken-down on from last week, or one left here because it was out if gas. In a couple of minutes, in the middle of a whirling square dance, the screen turned black, the cinematic summer ended, the snow went dark, there was nothing but my breath'.

But before this, while FH was riding around this deserted part of the world, he though he saw angels - had a vision. This was just Johnson's build up for something stronger, a primal screen for the ending of loneness. The narrator is never still, he is always in motion, and no matter where he goes, he is always surrounded by depressed and depressive souls.

The collection title comes from a Lou Reed's song called "Heroin". Addiction is part of the narrator's life - an important part, it brings people close and tear them apart. While trying to recover - without putting much thought on it - readers have a glimpse of a possibility of a better life, of something less sad and depressive. It is a drop of hope in a nightmare ocean of sadness.

Just Not Sure
I tried to like this collection, and there were moments, some pretty dog-gone good ones, but there were other moments, lots of them, where I wanted to wing the book across the room and say, "You're kidding me! This is the stuff that has folks yakking for ten years now?" There's a lot of the stuff of the novice writer in here, pages and pages of it... In a literary sense, the book remeinds me of a kid who comes down a Sunday morning to the stale remnants of his parents' wild party and smokes a pretzel and sips flat ginger ale while dealing himself a hand. I mean, don't we have any adults writing?

I don't think I have ever been as convinced that Am. Lit. is in need of a new voice, a new sensibility. I think the spareness that so many write about in praising Mr. Johnson comes from his gut instinct that he has nothing to add.

By the way -- I read 'Tree of Smoke,' tried to read it, but found it not only unbearable, but false. 'Jesus' Son,' at least, is not false.