Customer Reviews

Jesus' Son: Stories

5 star:		(80)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The beauty of Johnson's prose is evident in every one of these stories. The subject matter is dark, depressing, hallucinegenic, and yet the collection's overall feel is uplifting. Johnson could have written some cliched grotesqueries about the drug life, could have piled on the filth and dirt of it all, but he doesn't. The down-and-out characters, most of them junkies and criminals, are given a healthy dose of humanity, where a lesser writer would have turned them into abominable caricatures. Unlike most post modern writers, Johnson cares deeply about his characters and this comes out in every story. He doesn't follow the pomo aesthetic by declaring that life is inherently meaningless or hopeless, far from it. What we come to find in this amazing collection is the presence of hope in all things, no matter how low or degraded things might appear. And that is precisely what Denis Johnson shows us. There is beauty in everything, and if we can't see that, then we are not fully human.

I've never read anything by Chuck Palahniuk. I know about him, however, because the movie 'Fight Club' is based upon Palahniuk's novel of the same title. Chuck Palahniuk is a big fan of Denis Johnson's collection of short stories, 'Jesus' Son.' A recent article about Palahniuk in Poets & Writers Magazine says that Palahniuk 'has read 'Jesus' Son' over and over'more than two hundred times.' Palahniuk says, in that article, 'whenever I'm stuck, that's a book I read to sort of jump start myself.'

Palahniuk's endorsement was good enough for me. Any book that someone has read more than two hundred times must be worthwhile, or at least worth taking a look at. Besides, this remarkable collection of short stories is only 160 pages long, the pages are small (I measured it and it was about 7' x 4'), and there are not many words on each page. It doesn't take long to read. If it matters, I also always knew Denis Johnson was out there, a highly regarded poet and novelist, ever since 'Fiskadoro' had been published more than a decade ago. I had to read something by him sometime.

I sat down last night and started reading 'Jesus' Son' and didn't put it down until I was finished. It didn't take me long and was worth every minute. 'Jesus' Son' contains eleven short stories, all written in the first person, all connected by the common voice of the same narrator, a young, strung-out misfit whose pathology permeates every story. The stories are grim, just like the dark, desperate life of the narrator, just like the violent, disconnected, drug-clouded lives of the people who surround him. They are stories in which the narrator seemingly transcends his life, his drug- and alcohol-induced cloud of unknowing illuminating an at times crystalline-pure vision of the world. The physical world becomes continuous with the mental world in rushes of stunning prose. Thus, in 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking,' Johnson's narrator, sitting in the back of a car: 'Under Midwestern clouds like great grey brains we left the superhighway with a drifting sensation and entered Kansas City's rush hour with a sensation of running aground.' And later, while in a hospital emergency room, his mind drifts in a kind of hallucinatory fugue: 'It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.'

The writing is brilliant, attaining remarkable heights of intensity and clarity. At the same time, the characters and the events are dark and disturbing, the narrative interrupted and discontinuous. There is drug addiction, alcoholism, violence, torture, murder, voyeurism. There is a disturbing coldness, but also a profound clarity. It is writing from the bowels of life, writing that achieves its power through prose that is as hard, as pure, as the finest diamond. 'Jesus' Son' is not an upbeat collection of stories, but it is resplendent with a writing style and an imagination that celebrates the power of fiction written with stark feeling, written so it reflects the real lives of its desperate characters.

This slim book can easily be read in a few hours. The short stories are all vignettes out of the lives of the addicted and the desperate.

What this book does, better than any other book I've read, is capture the beauty and tragedy of these lost lives. Johnson is great at imagery, whether the misty, sunlit dive bar on a rickety pier, or the deserted drive-in in the snow. He's also great at writing from the inside of these characters-- their tragic worldview makes sense through their eyes. The hallucinatory beauty of these "prose-poems" goes hand-in-hand with the altered perceptions of the characters-- these people live as if in a dream state.

If you're ready to write off people on the fringes of society, then you probably won't appreciate this book. Like he did in "Angels," Johnson takes these forgotten people, and makes them live and breathe on the page. Many times, his characters seem more truly alive than those who would write them off or forget about them.

At first, I confess, I didn't know what to make of the stories that make up the collection "Jesus' Son". What does one make of stories about someone who is an addict through and through, determinedly ruining his life because it no longer seems to matter what happens to him? During the first fifty pages I had a visceral reaction to this book that was making me not only dislike it, but become angry at it; why should I care about people who won't help themselves, what is there to like about any of these people, etc. Then I began to notice tiny glimpses of carefully disguised humanism that leaked out of Johnson's prose, and went back to see if I had been missing them all along (sure enough, they had been there the whole time). I can only guess that my initial reaction was too volatile to pick up on subtle nuances of hope, and I am glad that I stuck with it long enough for that to die down because "Jesus' Son" is actually a remarkably heartfelt work despite its visceral tone. The characters are damaged and desperately unhappy people underneath their angry, hardened exteriors -- desperate for a connection that they can't bring themselves to hold on to, nor are they willing to put themselves out to get it. We never get to see why any of them are so damaged, which is mildly frustrating, but since it doesn't matter to the plots of the stories anyway it would have been out of place to get a lot of exposition. The misadventures and sometimes untimely demises of these characters are seen through the eyes of an unnamed narrator who lives among them, drinks with them, does drugs with them, uses them and is used by them. He is angry, confused, and suicidal, making his narration a spellbinding excursion into the pathos of the addict. When he remarks in one story that "I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched," it tears you up inside. I just wish it were more clear how he ended up in such dire straits as this, hopelessly using himself to death.

At 160 pages "Jesus' Son" goes by in a flash, but it's an emotionally draining journey and the collection packs a hefty punch despite its brevity. Happily, it does end on a hopeful note, which lets the reader breathe easily even though it is unclear how long that note can be sustained. Denis Johnson is clearly a gifted writer, and he has crafted a brutal gut-punch of a story collection that is as harrowing as it is realistic about the nature of an addict's life. Highly recommended.

That Denis Johnson chose such an unorthodox, non-linear strategy for his little book "Jesus' Son" is as much a testament to his genius as any of the often Dylan-esque prose-bites. Look at it this way: it may be said that every life becomes over time a jumbled series of unhinged recollections that change a little each time we use them; we suffer our decaying memories and willfully correct them like bad little children when we see something wrong with them. How much worse for the career junky? The sense of the absurd is strong here. The taut syle employed is reminiscent of Albert Camus' "The Stranger" and James M. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice." I admire most spare, non-judgmental, unsentimental writing and try to write that way myself. When done right, the ring of truth is everywhere and if you're looking for Hemingway's "one true sentence," you'll find veins bursting with them in "Jesus' Son." Go for it.

Logic dictates, by my own standards of applying stars, that a 5 would denote a book that is either thoroughly exciting or will be an enduring whole over time. Not providing this book with 5 stars doesn't necessarily exclude this book from either category--it IS exciting in the way it is almost physically stirring and utterly sharp and suprising in its details. And I would hope that this work would endure, at the very least as something to be passed amongst aspiring writers as hope that highly structured, workshop-tight prose is not the only writing in the world given any value.

This string of interconnected short stories, following the happenings of a barebones narrator out to take in the most of a bleak existence, is certainly very Camus in flavor (and overly generic description), but Johnson reaches a level of intensity and pathos that he was merely aspiring towards in a book like _Angels_. In the previous book, Johnson tried too hard to mix a character's cruelties with moments of soul, and so the attempts at pathos came across as a little too manipulative. In _Jesus' Son_, however, characters are stark and mean and inhumane while also showing glimmers of a purely poetic soul, and I like the challenge Johnson undergoes of presenting a narrator who can go from chewing on stolen hospital pills to seeing a world of promise where "the sky is blue and the dead are coming back." This intense dichotomy is not necessarily dual but seems satisfyingly unified in this book, to make this a book of horror and soul. The narrative can get quite precise at some times, distracting at others, but the single-minded drive that bulls its way through this, though a little too much to take at times, which will then inspire an occasional reprieve to recollect one's bearings, is quite a marvel.

Let's imagine that Raymond Carver (the short story writer) and Charles Simic (the poet) produced an offspring who immersed himself in Beat literature and dropped acid. Such an offspring might be the author of this book. Like Simic, Johnson pins down the surreal, the grotesque; and like Carver, he makes use of a narrative style at once plain and poetic. And like every serious writer before him, Johnson brings to light some of our most urgent human emotions: fear of death, desperation, loneliness, fear of taking responsibility for someone else as well as for oneself.

"Jesus' Son," marketed as a collection of stories, is really one disjointed story whose various settings include hospitals, abandoned houses, a seedy bar called The Vine, and the highways and country roads connecting them. The story isn't told chronologically, so I'd recommend reading the book two, three more times. Characters in one story make flash cameos in another, and specific happenings in earlier stories are alluded to in later stories. Fantastic stuff.

Each story works as a kind of prose poem: terse, cadenced, elegant. Johnson wastes not a single word or image. The best of these stories (to me, at least) is "Emergency," which is truly nothing short of a contemporary masterpiece. It begins with a man wandering into a hospital emergency room with a knife in his eye, and ends with two hospital workers driving aimlessly in the country while caring for near-dead baby rabbits. I'll give away nothing else, but brace yourself: the dialogue is hilarious and the portrayal of the medical establishment (in all its humanness) isn't too flattering. And the ironies and complexities of the book's title will keep your mind active long after you've completed the last sentence. In short, a great book, highly recommended!

I read this book for the first time about eight years ago, and I still find myself thinking about certain lines and images from the stories. It's great writing and very concise. Despite the dark subject matter, I find the stories inspiring and they resonate with me although I don't find drugs or crime very romantic. Johnson's novel, "Already Dead" is also very amazing, and a more elaborate story.

Denis Johnson's "Jesus' Son" is a wonderful collection of short stories that contains two masterpieces of short fiction: "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" and "Emergency." Other memorable stories in this selection are "Dirty Wedding" and Beverly Home." While it is rumored that the former head of the Stegner creative writing program at Stanford, has said that Johnson's work does not qualify as "moral fiction," such criticism is irrelevant. While I have no idea what Johnson's background is besides his also being a poet, let me assure you, Johnson is not one of the creative writing school guys and gals churning out boring mood pieces for Masters of Fine Arts dissertations. While this work would not qualify as transgressive fiction and lies just a needle-length to the east of the "South of No North" of Charles Bukowski, there is the rawness and vitality of real life here, of the alky, the junky, of the fuck-up, the part-time pervert, of the loser that is really quite wonderful in that it has clearly been earned and is honestly observed. Johnson's dialogue is superb; check out the exchanges in "Emergency" for a primer on how to write dialogue truly. Not only is Johnson's dialogue true in the sense of it capturing the rythms of the way people speak, it brilliantly evokes their inner state of mind by revealing their evasions. And, being a poet, Johnson has an impressive command of metaphor that is never false. Wonderful writing. Don't take my word for it: Johnson is the only writer volunteered by Saul Bellow himself as worth reading in his recent "Playboy" interview

Ive never read anything by Chuck Palahniuk. I know about him, however, because the movie Fight Club is based upon Palahniuks novel of the same title. Chuck Palahniuk is a big fan of Denis Johnsons collection of short stories, Jesus Son. A recent article about Palahniuk in Poets & Writers Magazine says that Palahniuk has read Jesus Son over and overmore than two hundred times. Palahniuk says, in that article, whenever Im stuck, thats a book I read to sort of jump start myself.

Palahniuks endorsement was good enough for me. Any book that someone has read more than two hundred times must be worthwhile, or at least worth taking a look at. Besides, this remarkable collection of short stories is only 160 pages long, the pages are small (I measured it and it was about 7 x 4), and there are not many words on each page. It doesnt take long to read. If it matters, I also always knew Denis Johnson was out there, a highly regarded poet and novelist, ever since Fiskadoro had been published more than a decade ago. I had to read something by him sometime.

I sat down last night and started reading Jesus Son and didnt put it down until I was finished. It didnt take me long and was worth every minute. Jesus Son contains eleven short stories, all written in the first person, all connected by the common voice of the same narrator, a young, strung-out misfit whose pathology permeates every story. The stories are grim, just like the dark, desperate life of the narrator, just like the violent, disconnected, drug-clouded lives of the people who surround him. They are stories in which the narrator seemingly transcends his life, his drug- and alcohol-induced cloud of unknowing illuminating an at times crystalline-pure vision of the world. The physical world becomes continuous with the mental world in rushes of stunning prose. Thus, in Car Crash While Hitchhiking, Johnsons narrator, sitting in the back of a car: Under Midwestern clouds like great grey brains we left the superhighway with a drifting sensation and entered Kansas Citys rush hour with a sensation of running aground. And later, while in a hospital emergency room, his mind drifts in a kind of hallucinatory fugue: It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.

The writing is brilliant, attaining remarkable heights of intensity and clarity. At the same time, the characters and the events are dark and disturbing, the narrative interrupted and discontinuous. There is drug addiction, alcoholism, violence, torture, murder, voyeurism. There is a disturbing coldness, but also a profound clarity. It is writing from the bowels of life, writing that achieves its power through prose that is as hard, as pure, as the finest diamond. Jesus Son is not an upbeat collection of stories, but it is resplendent with a writing style and an imagination that celebrates the power of fiction written with stark feeling, written so it reflects the real lives of its desperate characters.