Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
Jesus’ Son, a collection of short stories by Denis Johnson that has become a literary classic, depicts a violent and disorganized world filled with addicts and lost souls that represents every extremity of American culture. These are tales of transcendence and escalating grief, of glories and hallucinations, of getting lost, finding it, and then getting lost again. Jesus’ Son has earned a spot on its own among the canonical works of American literature from the twentieth century thanks to its insights and frantic energy. In 1999, it was turned into a critically acclaimed motion picture.
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
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Stephen Dobyns, a poet, famously compared his writing to “a man on towering stilts attached to roller skates on the slick dance floor of an ocean liner plowing through typhoon-ridden waters” in one of his poems.
The eleven short stories in Jesus’ Son are cohesive because characters appear in multiple stories and they all seem to be told by the same narrator. They are sparsely written and seem to draw from the Beat writers. Johnson is a poet as well, and his exquisite use of language inspires tales of drug binges and vehicle crashes.
I adore the fact that Denis’s writing, especially Jesus’ Son, is filled with characters who are on the periphery by practically every quantifiable criterion. His characters resemble life’s truants. They keep showing off, and we are both moved and horrified by their psychological nastiness. We find it hard to accept that humans are this unaware of themselves or so destructive of themselves. I adore how his characters, especially in Jesus’ Son, are always torn between the person they are and the person they want they could be. He has a remarkable talent for making our reality seem unfamiliar through the keen senses of his characters.
