Jesus' Son
Books | Fiction / Literary
3.9
(195)
Denis Johnson
Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy, and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. Set in the Midwest and West, they are narrated by a young man, an alcoholic and heroin addict, whose dependencies have led him to petty crime, cruelty, betrayal, and various kinds of loss. Many of them are centered around the Vine, a bar in an Iowa town where the narrator meets his friends and forms alliances "based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn't yet come to light". In "Work", he and another man vandalize an empty house, stripping it of electrical wire to sell for scrap; "Dirty Wedding" evokes the emotional scars of an abortion from an unusual viewpoint; in "Beverly Home", our hero finds himself spying on a Mennonite couple through their bedroom window. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.
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More Details:
Author
Denis Johnson
Pages
160
Publisher
Macmillan
Published Date
2009-02-17
ISBN
031242874X 9780312428747
Ratings
Google: 4
Community ReviewsSee all
"This is a weird one for me to consider. My husband and I hold the movie Jesus’ Son dear in our history. So far in my life there had only been one movie that superseded it’s source book, but this is now the second book for me where I feel the movie was better. I did not find myself connecting to the characters in the book the same way I did in the movie, which could be a function of the book not really fleshing out too many characters in each story aside from the narrator. There are some gems of prose nuzzled in, but much of the writing feels detached in a way the movie does not. One last comparison: You know how lacroix (the beverage) is always joked about being “if you had a can of sparkling water and *thought* about the flavor of a fruit, that’s lacroix”? This book is lacroix and Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren is the real fruit flavor."
C
CaitVD
"The just-below-the-surface world of drugs and loneliness, intersects hopeful and masterfully poetic observations. Gritty, yet also tenderly beautiful."
Matt Chinworth