Jesus' Son: Stories
by Denis Johnson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Denis JohnsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-02-17
ISBN: 031242874X
Number of pages: 144
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Jesus' Son: Stories
Book Review: Sad was never so funny
Summary: 5 Stars
A guy has a knife stuck in his eye; a drugged-out hospital orderly saves him without quite knowing what he's done. Another guy gets shot in a farmhouse, for no reason. A third guy overdoses. Prison looms for everyone. And it all takes place in the gloomy flatland of the Midwest, circa 1971.
"Jesus' Son" is one of the ten funniest books I've ever read.
But, you sputter, it's a bummer. Indeed it is. And if you think heroin addiction is tawdry (and it is, it is) and the people who use hard drugs are losers (and they are, they are) and there is Nothing Funny about an overdose, then these eleven stories are so not for you.
But if you have a taste for Black Humor or an appreciation of outlandish characters --- or even an ear for brilliant writing --- this 160-page book will give you the most delightful two-to-three hours of reading you've experienced in a long, long time. Well, maybe not three hours. Maybe a lot more --- for if, like me, you occasionally find yourself in need of the kind of laugh that only a book can provide, your eye goes instinctively to "Jesus' Son." Your hand involuntarily removes it from the shelf. And before you know it, you're lost in the world of this remarkable book.
Let's just consider the first story," Car Crash While Hitchhiking." It is exactly that. The narrator is a hitchhiker who, on one leg of his trip that day, has been fed pills by a salesman. He is now wired and omniscient:
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 accident occurs. Predictable events follow. Then comes an ending that confounds all expectation: "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."
That last line --- directly addressed to the reader --- announces that these will not be "traditional" stories, with characters who describe their troubles and fix them. This is a world of the lost: freaks abandoned by God, people who connect with holiness only (in the words of the Lou Reed song that provides the title) "when I'm rushing on my run."
The power of these stories is the writing, first and foremost, but there is also the sense that these stories are real. As Johnson recalls, "I was addicted to everything....When I was 21, I went into my first psych ward for alcohol." Then he moved on to drugs. "But I was not a constant junkie. You can't just go into a drugstore and say, 'I'll have some heroin, please.' You have to be prepared to enter into all kinds of adventures that I wasn't strong enough for."
Those adventures included study at the University of Iowa with Raymond Carver. He wrote "Jesus' Son" because he owed the IRS $10,000 and had these stories in his head:
"I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories apropos of nothing about when I was drinking and using and people would say, "You should write these things down." I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision. So I worked on them once in a while, then I started using stories I heard other people tell, and then I started making some up. Pretty soon it was fiction. Then I just forgot about it. I thought, I'm not going to parade my defects, my history of being a spiritual cripple, out in front of a lot of other people. But once in a while I'd write a little more --- I would just hear the voices."
He wrote books before, he's written books since, but "Jesus' Son" is the one that readers cherish. Is it that there's something about hair-raising stories told by addicts that we just can't resist? Or is it just the voices? Either way, these stories are...addictive
Summary of Jesus' Son: Stories
Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiraling grief and trancendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost an dfound and lost again. The raw beauty and careening energy of Denis Johnson's prose has earned this book a place among the classics of twentieth-century American literature.
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
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