A strange genre-bendy novel about a man who moves to a small town, leaving behind a life that culminated in a suicide attempt. The story follows this man as he grapples with his faith, with God, with his delusions, and his sanity.

I love Denis Johnson, I count him among my favourite writers, but sadly this is my least favourite of the six books of his I’ve read. It does stand apart from the other five, though: it’s looser, and a lot more open-ended. I would love to know how Johnson felt about it, looking back on it years later – if he was critical of what I perceive to be a slackness, or authorial indecision. He once said that he regretted his attempts to talk about his religious beliefs: “I’m not qualified. I don’t know who God is, or any of that. People concerned with those questions turn up in my stories, but I can’t explain why they do. Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t.”

In saying that though, I also actually enjoyed it for its very 90s American novel vibe. It made me nostalgic. I used to read a lot more late twentieth century novels by American men. Novels like this don’t get written anymore. And Johnson’s writing is always fantastic. He’s a natural poet, and as one review stated, “there is real music in his prose.”

It had been years since my last Johnson book, so it was nice to be in silent communion with him again. With a writer whose fictions you connect to naturally and deeply, often just their voice alone is enough.

Meh. Confused and weird, not in a good way. I love Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke and Already Dead are awesome), but is not that great. Some good color on Cape Cod back in the day, but otherwise just kinda weird.

Quirky books that are well-written are my favorites. Of course, the well-written part makes the difference, but if it has both elements and, by the end, I'm wanting to read more of what the author has out there, that's, for me, a kind of treasure, and this book is that. Protagonist Lenny English's sheer ineptitude progresses from odd to almost frustrating, but Johnson, with a definite appreciation for absurdity, skillfully manages to observe the humor in misery and human relations, and he keeps things amusing. Johnson's writing struck me as a mixture of Bukowski and Bob Dylan--the best of both--but the book I thought of most while reading this one was J. Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," another masterpiece of good writing and high quirk.

Jesus' Son was a formative book for me; an incredible reading experience and a book I've revisited several times since I first read it a couple of years ago. But since then, I've read many other Johnson novels, including this one, and none of them came close to the quasi-mystical experience that Jesus's Son is. Was Johnson a brilliant short story writer who kept hacking at the novel all along? Perhaps his forthcoming posthumous collection of stories will be the best book we've had by him since Jesus's Son... Anyway, this one felt like a mostly forgettable semi-noir novel with the occasional luminous sentence.