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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780060975777
ISBN: 0060975776
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: December 15, 1993
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: December 15, 1993
Sales Rank: 19938
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
An intense collection of interconnected stories that portray life through the eyes of a young man in a small Iowa town, by the author of Already Dead: A California Gothic, Angels and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.
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
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Although Denis Johnson's JESUS' SON is often compared to Charles Bukowski, I think this is profoundly unfair to Johnson; he is a far better writer. The two writers feature similar characters in their stories, but Johnson has a gift for language that has seldom been seen. His is the art of the perfect sentence, the perfect, surprising, shocking word.
The stories are very, very loosely linked stories that could well feature the same narrator. A couple of the stories reference events ... Read More
Rating:  -
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.
Rating: -
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. ... Read More
Rating: -
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 ... Read More
Rating:  -
More than the actual stories, I think what's most impressive about Johnson's writing is his fragmented approach to time. Consider the first story, "Wreck While Hitchhiking" if you will. While some people may suspect that the prevalence of drugs is an attempt to shock, and thereby gain sales, I suspect that it has more to do with the secret growing casualness society has with narcotics.
I borrowed this book for a night. I was only able to read the first three stories (the first, concerning the ... Read More
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