The Plot: Jesus' Son is a visionary chronicle of dreamers, addicts, and lost souls. These stories tell of spiralling grief and transcendence, of rock bottom and redemption, of getting lost and found 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. (Taken from the publisher’s website)The Review: Reading more like a Narcotics Anonymous confession than a work of fiction, Johnson’s short story collection about addicts and loners sucks the reader in with its tales of depravity and forces them to ask how much of it is actually fiction and how much is real. Owing a debt to Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett’s style of clipped, punchy sentences, Johnson is able to create poignant stories that are seemingly autobiographical, if slightly fictionalized for publication. The stories never gloss over the worse parts of addiction and even offer redemption for those who are down, but not out.
Johnson does an admirable job of setting the scene, utilizing a general sense of surrealism in the earlier stories before the narrator gets clean, which lends itself to the character’s state of mind, where there is haziness due to imbibing drugs and drink in copious amounts. Actions have reactions, but they are done with a disconnection that only an addict could be a part of. For a good chunk of his life, the narrator floats above what happens, drifting like a Kerouac creation from event to event with little reason for being.
Even though the narrator is mired in the ugliness of addiction, where relationships fall apart and people get hurt, both emotionally and physically, Johnson offers glimpses of beauty and wonder throughout the book with his descriptions of the environments, as if to say that it is always there, if we just look hard enough:
This was in the spring of that year, the season when some varieties of cactus produced tiny blossoms out of their thorns. To catch the bus home each day I walked through a vacant lot, and sometimes I’d run right up on one-one small flower that looked as if it had fallen down here from Andromeda, surrounded by a part of the world cast mainly in eleven hundred shades of brown, under a sky whose blueness seemed to get lost in its own distances. Dizzy, enchanted-I’d have felt the same if I’d been walking along and run into an elf out here sitting in a little chair. The desert days were already burning, but nothing could stifle these flowers.
Clocking in at a brisk 133 pages, Jesus’ Son doesn’t overstay its welcome and is better for it, because without a padded page count each of Johnson’s words counts for something and nothing is wasted, especially considering his economy of language. Being able to read the book in one sitting gives the narrator’s character arc an immediacy that wouldn’t be there if it was stretched over a longer period of time. Much like meeting someone at a bar and getting to know them in that short time period, knowing full well that you’ll never meet them again, the reader gets to know the narrator in the same manner. Johnson’s decision to have the narrator segue from a fully fledged addict to someone struggling with sobriety in between stories is an interesting one, because it forces the reader to fill in the blanks about the character themselves. The narrator’s epiphany or moment of clarity is shrouded in mystery, so the reader is forced to save him themselves. Redemption isn’t found within the pages, it is found within whatever the reader projects on the character.
If there is one complaint about the book, it would be that there is no introduction or retrospective by Johnson to answer some of the questions that the book brings up. It is a minor complaint and has no bearing on my enjoyment of the book, but since this was a reissue of a book first published in 1992, a look back would seem fitting at this juncture.
The Package: The cover is rather striking in its simplicity, and I like the fact that the designer decided to let colours carry the cover instead of using an image. I’ve already lamented over the lack of extras above, so I won’t repeat myself here.
If You Liked This: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. While completely different stylistically, O’Brien also proved himself to be a master of the short story with this collection, which fictionalizes a lot of his experiences in the Vietnam War, capturing the same poignancy that Johnson did with his subject matter.
The Rating: Four Jesus’ daughters out of five. (Spoilers for The Da Vinci Code!)
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