Denis Johnson was a writer with a unique style, and this collection, considered by many to be a classic, proves it- there are short sentences here that pack a huge punch with moments of great emotional resonance. While the stories here all uniformly good though, if you like movement and resolution in your plot, you may not find much to like. Also, while it's great to give a human perspective on drug addiction, it has to be said that this collection is overwhelmingly white and male.
Still, a good story is a good story, and Jesus' Son has quite a few. They're all filled with fantastic writing and even more fantastic imagery. Take for example this bit from "Emergency," a story about a man who walks into an emergency room with a knife lodged in his eye:

"We bumped softly down a hill toward an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard, filled with rows and rows of austere, identical markers over soldiers' graves. I'd never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there'd been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear."

The best stories here are "Dundun," "Work" and the last one "Beverly Home" which is also the longest story of the lot. There's a lot of mess here, and sometimes, the characters indulge in behaviour that is less than extraordinary. But what is so remarkable with these stories is how sublime they are; there's an inexplicable quasi-divine texture to Johnson's writing. What he was able to do with a single paragraph, most other writers would need pages to accomplish.

Un recorrido, capturando momentos, vidas rotas, desamparo, enajenación y destinos robados. Una colección de sueños e ilusiones, desde el punto solitario de individuos que desean el amor pero son incapaces de tocarlo sin herirlo. Son quemados por la pasión, lo que no entienden y lo que quieren pero no pueden tener.

A hallucinagenic fairytale about a lost soul in the 1970s, a man who feels too much, sees too much, experiences too much, where pleasure and pain intermingle. Stunning prose, astonishing insights. Read this is you're looking for something different and exceptional.

دو نقطه خط.

"I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched."

Magnificent, concise writing. A calm sort of sad, and strangely relaxing. Stories about people living in the corners of society.

It’s like I’m sitting on the porch of a shack in the middle of nowhere, listening to the saddest old man I know tell me misremembered stories about how shitty he was when he was young.

It all feels extremely real, like lives that were lived. The stories are connected, and all share a protagonist. It's an ethereal novella of sorts, each story like a chunk of truth torn from reality, with otherwise fiction filling in the cracks.

In the psychedelic world everything is surreal… Everything is blurred…

The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts. My thoughts zoomed pitifully. The traveling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened.

In the phantasmagoric surroundings even hopes and pursuits turn surreal…

And with each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who’d love me. And then I would remember I had a wife at home who loved me, or later that my wife had left me and I was terrified, or again later that I had a beautiful alcoholic girlfriend who would make me happy forever.

Environs are certainly psychedelic but Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds seems to be flying someplace else… So far away from here…

…one small orange flower that looked as if it had fallen down here from Andromeda, surrounded by a part of the world cast mainly in eleven hundred shades of brown, under a sky whose blueness seemed to get lost in its own distances.

Day in, day out… Life goes on in a trashy whirlwind… No purpose… No meaning…

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

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And when it comes to fiction a bigly chunk of “my” people are drug addicts . . . .

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Jesus’ Son has been on my TBR for an age due to the fact that it is considered a modern classic and has appeared on list after list of must reads that I can’t ever stop myself from looking at, despite having 11,000,000,000,000 books already waiting for me to get to them. I can’t guarantee everyone will love this one – due to the aforementioned drug addict narrator along with a supporting cast of the same ilk – not to mention the fact that a lot of these shorts are real Debbie Downers. Buuuuuuuuuuut, the writing is pretty brilliant and my library copy literally fit in the palm of my hand (it is a miracle I did not lose it – I did, however, receive a past due notice because it’s so small I forgot I stuck it in my car console for safekeeping), so it’s not like it’s going to take much of your time.

Go read J. Kent Messum’s review review for more details. He’s a writer by trade so he actually uses words rather than pictures to get his point across and he also talks about the audio, which is apparently read by the best reader of all time . . . .

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Drugs, Redemption, And Poetry

Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son" combines a portrayal of a life of addiction and crime with a vision of transcendence, compassion and hope. The book consists of eleven short vignettes tied together by a first-person narrator who describes his addiction to drugs, alcohol, and crime and his halting steps to recovery. The stories are set in the American West and Midwest, largely in rural communities but also in Chicago, Seattle, and Phoenix. The narrator never reveals his real name; he is known only by an obscenity given to him by an acquaintance which the narrator accepts as capturing his low sense of self-esteem.

The highly gritty stories move around both in physical location and in the narrator's mind. They show cheap bars, rusted cars, hospitals, detox facilities, abandoned homes, jails and police stations and more. Much of the time the narrator is high and his words move around giving a disjointed feel. Most of the characters in the book are poor frequently violent addicts or recovering addicts.

The language of the book manages to be luminous while giving a harsh portrait of the main character and of the life of addiction. The narrator has a sense of his own degradation but also has a feeling of transcendence and the possibility of redeeming a wasted life. The depictions of a sordid life are infused with religious imagery and ultimate hope. For all its brevity, the book shows the relationship of seeming conflicting parts of human experience and works to draw them together through language.

Written in 1992, "Jesus' Son" already has become a classic. The book was made into an award-winning film of the same name starring Billy Crudup. Denis Johnson (1949 -- 2017) would go on to receive the National Book Award together with other literary honors. I was glad to get to know this author and this short, visionary work.

Robin Friedman

Is there a way of writing the right stories about the right people,telling everything neatly from start to finish. An Uppercase letter starting the story and a full stop waiting at the end. A boy meeting girl on the first page and walking away with her in the last one.

Or are stories like these...snapshots of nightmares which some would call hell, but is home to some. Where beautiful sentences strike you out of the blue, so beautiful that you read them again and again, flashes of lightning in a desolate sky.
A sky that won't shed tears for us anymore.
And if it did,
I knew every raindrop by its name.

Raindrops that cannot purify our soul. Our soul that is a ghost beyond redemption running hopeless to find love. Love that was never ours in first place.

With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.

So, what if you are loved.


And the night, oh the night when the wind
full of outer space gnaws at our faces; that wished for,
gentle, deceptive one waiting painfully for the lonely heart -
she'd stay on for anyone. Is she easier on lovers?
Ah,but they only use each other to hide what awaits them.

-Rilke

Now re-re-read as part of my project to read all of Johnson's fiction and poetry in publication order.

I don't have a lot to add to what I wrote in my review below. Except to say that a) this is the most novel-like collection of short stories you could possibly envisage, b) reading Johnson's books in order shows how his previous book, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, was a forerunner of this in many ways, not just publication order and c) this novel/short story collection is simply brilliant.

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I re-read this book in June 2017 because Denis Johnson died at the end of May 2017 and it felt appropriate to mark that somehow. He has written several books that I admire but Jesus' Son is one of those books where the language re-wires your brain as you read it and you come out of it a different person than you were when you started it. And it only takes a couple of hours to read, so that suggests a pretty intense experience. And it is.

The New York Times says it: "is his fifth book of fiction, the previous four being novels with similar preoccupations: loveless promiscuity, the abuse of narcotics and alcohol, the debilitating effects of parental neglect and the sometimes violent paradoxes inherent in the Christian notions of salvation and self-sacrifice. His prose, especially in this book and in the novels ‘Angels’ and ‘Resuscitation of a Hanged Man’, consistently generates imagery of ferocious intensity, much of it shaded with a menacing, even deranged sense of humor. No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked ‘insensitivity’ in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction."

The title of the book comes from the Velvet Underground song "Heroin" and this is apt because the unnamed (apart from his nickname that I won’t mention here as it is a bit rude) narrator is a heroin addict:

When I'm rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

Sometimes this book is described as a collection of short stories, but I think it is fair to call it a novel. The stories are linked by more than having the same narrator. They refer to one another, characters repeat (sometimes strangely given that the chronology isn’t linear) and even though they are all separate episodes, there is a feeling of a story developing. Our narrator goes from drug-addled adventures through to a detox program. It definitely hangs together. The non-linear chronology adds to the disjointed feel. I’ve never "done drugs" but I can imagine that the kind of atmosphere Johnson creates here would resonate for those who have. For me, what I see is a group of people with absolutely no roots, no stability: they go where life takes them without thinking about the consequences of actions for themselves or for others. It leads to some comedy, but also to some scary situations.

And then there’s the language. For a while, I tried to highlight the beautiful sentences, but I soon realised I was highlighting more than I wasn’t. A few examples (I hope you like them as much as I do - it may be that they work best in context with the rest of the book):

Sometimes what I wouldn’t give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9.00am telling lies to one another, far from God

Generally, the closest I ever came to wondering about the meaning of it all was to consider that I must be the victim of a joke.

It was a long straight road through dry fields as far as a person could see. You’d think the sky didn’t have any air in it, and the earth was made of paper. Rather than moving, we were just getting smaller and smaller.

On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, and if there’d been anything in my bowels I would have messed my pants from fear. Georgie opened his arms and cried out, “It’s the drive-in, man!”

And sometimes a dust storm would stand off in the desert, towering so high it was like another city—a terrifying new era approaching, blurring our dreams.

When I first read this book (many years ago), it made me realise that language could do things to me that, until then, I think I had thought only music could do. Re-reading it now (maybe the fourth or fifth time - I’ve lost count a bit), I still see it the same way.

PS The film version is also excellent!

All narrated by a recovering heroin addict these interrelated stories are vignettes of a world where normality as we know it has been completely expunged. In one story he obsessively spies on a married woman in the shower; in another he works as a porter in a hospital and meets a man with a knife impaled in his eyeball; in another he helps dump the dead body of someone his friend has accidentally shot. Johnson comes up with lots of fabulous images for this surreal underworld he has created. One that I especially loved was when the narrator on a night bus sees everything through the dark window as resembling symbols on a slot machine, as if for him a slot machine has come to represent the height of opportunity. Another very edifying read. 4+ stars.

To find Rick Bass's words of praise in the opening pages, speaking about this great 50,000-volt kick thrill of a book, I knew that this would be just the thing to cure my reading inertia. I'd followed a Carson McCullers novel like a dream into the rabbit hole, shrunk and dreamed until This One woke me like a cruel Queen. Consider me awake.

Not unlike characters from the early works of McCarthy, the faces that come in and out of focus in Denis Johnson's fictional world are victims of their own misfortune, unravelling fast, doing sad and cruel things and all the while saying & thinking beautiful and stupid things. The central character / Narrator wanders stoned, drunk, high & wretched into the most sublime heart-territory. When he's not prophetic he's outlandishly funny.

The book is necessarily short at 133 pages, any longer and I might consider its beauty gratuitous.

Lastly, I can't help but feel that the author sneaks in messages to his readers:

"It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.

*

"Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine".