Customer Reviews

Jesus' Son: Stories

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This was seen on a recommended list by a somewhat famous author. I was sadly disappointed. The book had a number of short stories of which NONE inspired me. One of the stories mentions how one can't just sit on the bus as 'you've got to have a destination'. It's too bad the author of this book had no true destination. I was simply lost in nonsense. Don't give this your time--it's a waste of time. I felt the same way the author did on the last page of the book when he wrote 'Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges'. That's for sure...what a shame.

Absolutely entrancing book. I'm already halfway done my second reading of the book this week. Johnson's prose is electric and hard hitting. As with most of the best writers, what he doesn't say is as enticing as what he says.

Lucid, clear, yet muffled and hallucinatory. A truly fantastic and beautiful book.

Jesus' Son: stories / by Denis Johnson is a collection of short stories by Denis Johnson. The stories center around the meanderings of a heroin junkie--a dude named F'head (Apostrophes signal omissions, okay?)--who never really knows where he is, or what's going on. Like the protagonist in the movie Trainspotting, which is very similar to Jesus' Son, F'head realizes his life is going nowhere, but he finds himself trapped in a cycle of hopelessness and addiction and fantasy.

And I quote: "I'm not ready to go into all that," I said. A yellow bird fluttered close to my face, and my muscles grabbed. Now I was flopping like a fish. When I squeezed shut my eyes, tears exploded from the sockets. When I opened them, I was on my stomach." p.12.

F'head's friends, Tom, Richard, Jack Hotel, hang out at a shady bar called The Vine and get involved in junkie intrigue: shootings, pill-poppings, and meetings to hatch petty heists. Much of the miserableness starts there. Later (earlier?), F'head works as an orderly in a hospital and a nursing home.

As a narrator, F'head is incredibly unreliable, sprinkling hallucinations into his stories, telling stories that he later realizes never happened, and often going "unstuck" in time, Vonnegut-style, throwing any sense of continuity right out the window. Knock, knock. Who's there? A surrealist. A surrealist who? Banana. Like that, just smarter and silly-less.

Denis Johnson's prose is magnificent. Look:

"...this afternoon was the best of those times. We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn't know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked." p. 65.

Jesus' Son's F'head is probably the most sympathetic anti-hero you'll find. You'll laugh at the dead-on dialogue, smile at F'head's innocence, sympathize with his loneliness, wonder at the wonderfulness of the writing, and act out any other verb that can be associated with a butt-busting good read.

Warning: Jesus' Son contains lots of profanity and random violence -- just like in real life. If that is the kind of stuff that bothers you, then you should definitely stay away from this great book. If not, definitely check it out! Another Amazon pick I need to mention, lighter and funnier in tone, is The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez, a fun novel I've already read twice this one week.

I'm not usually a reader 'high literature' and yet I found myself completely sucked into this collection of short stories about a perpetual screw up. The writing is minimalist, so every word counts. There were times when I thought a story was underwritten, but overall I found myself holding on to this book after I read it. I won't even lend it out! It's definitely a book I will read again. Also check out The Losers' Club by Richard Perez, WILL@epicqwest.com (a medicated memoir) by Tom Grimes (which Denis Johnson recommends, too).

The beauty of Johnson's prose is evident in every one of these stories. The subject matter is dark, depressing, hallucinegenic, and yet the collection's overall feel is uplifting. Johnson could have written some cliched grotesqueries about the drug life, could have piled on the filth and dirt of it all, but he doesn't. The down-and-out characters, most of them junkies and criminals, are given a healthy dose of humanity, where a lesser writer would have turned them into abominable caricatures. Unlike most post modern writers, Johnson cares deeply about his characters and this comes out in every story. He doesn't follow the pomo aesthetic by declaring that life is inherently meaningless or hopeless, far from it. What we come to find in this amazing collection is the presence of hope in all things, no matter how low or degraded things might appear. And that is precisely what Denis Johnson shows us. There is beauty in everything, and if we can't see that, then we are not fully human.

This slim book can easily be read in a few hours. The short stories are all vignettes out of the lives of the addicted and the desperate.

What this book does, better than any other book I've read, is capture the beauty and tragedy of these lost lives. Johnson is great at imagery, whether the misty, sunlit dive bar on a rickety pier, or the deserted drive-in in the snow. He's also great at writing from the inside of these characters-- their tragic worldview makes sense through their eyes. The hallucinatory beauty of these "prose-poems" goes hand-in-hand with the altered perceptions of the characters-- these people live as if in a dream state.

If you're ready to write off people on the fringes of society, then you probably won't appreciate this book. Like he did in "Angels," Johnson takes these forgotten people, and makes them live and breathe on the page. Many times, his characters seem more truly alive than those who would write them off or forget about them.

I read this book for the first time about eight years ago, and I still find myself thinking about certain lines and images from the stories. It's great writing and very concise. Despite the dark subject matter, I find the stories inspiring and they resonate with me although I don't find drugs or crime very romantic. Johnson's novel, "Already Dead" is also very amazing, and a more elaborate story.

First, this is a review of the book, not the movie. The book the movie's based on, not the movie which is based upon it. Got it?

Secondly, the book is about a drug user, and contains lots of profanity. Some people consider the title blasphemous. If that bothers you, stop reading this epinion and write your own. Please don't take your problems with the book out on me.

Now I can get on with it.

Jesus' Son: stories / by Denis Johnson is a collection of short stories by Denis Johnson (?!), strung together like paper dolls. They were originally published in The New Yorker, Esquire, and the Paris Review, among others.

The stories center around the meanderings of a heroin junkie--a dude named F'head (Apostrophes signal omissions, 'member?)--who never really knows where he is, or what's going on. Like the protagonist in the movie Trainspotting, which is very similar to Jesus' Son, F'head realizes his life is going nowhere, but he finds himself trapped in a cycle of hopelessness and addiction and fantasy.

And I quote, quote: "I'm not ready to go into all that," I said. A yellow bird fluttered close to my face, and my muscles grabbed. Now I was flopping like a fish. When I squeezed shut my eyes, tears exploded from the sockets. When I opened them, I was on my stomach. endquote, p.12.

F'head's friends, Tom, Richard, Jack Hotel, hang out at a shady bar called The Vine and get involved in junkie intrigue: shootings, pill-poppings, and meetings to hatch petty heists. Much of the miserableness starts there. Later (earlier?), F'head works as an orderly in a hospital and a nursing home. Now I understand my health care professionals better.

As a narrator, F'head is incredibly uncredible, sprinkling hallucinations into his stories, telling stories that he later realizes never happened, and often going "unstuck" in time, Vonnegut-style, throwing any sense of continuity right out the window. Knock, knock. Who's there? A surrealist. A surrealist who? Banana. Like that, just smarter and silly-less.

Denis Johnson's prose is magnificent. Look:

...this afternoon was the best of those times. We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn't know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked. p. 65.

Jesus' Son's F'head is probably the most sympathetic anti-hero you'll find. You'll laugh at the dead-on dialogue, smile at F'head's innocence, cry at his loneliness, wonder at the wonderfulness of the writing, and act out any other verb that can be associated with a butt-busting good read.

So, read this book.

Let's imagine that Raymond Carver (the short story writer) and Charles Simic (the poet) produced an offspring who immersed himself in Beat literature and dropped acid. Such an offspring might be the author of this book. Like Simic, Johnson pins down the surreal, the grotesque; and like Carver, he makes use of a narrative style at once plain and poetic. And like every serious writer before him, Johnson brings to light some of our most urgent human emotions: fear of death, desperation, loneliness, fear of taking responsibility for someone else as well as for oneself.

"Jesus' Son," marketed as a collection of stories, is really one disjointed story whose various settings include hospitals, abandoned houses, a seedy bar called The Vine, and the highways and country roads connecting them. The story isn't told chronologically, so I'd recommend reading the book two, three more times. Characters in one story make flash cameos in another, and specific happenings in earlier stories are alluded to in later stories. Fantastic stuff.

Each story works as a kind of prose poem: terse, cadenced, elegant. Johnson wastes not a single word or image. The best of these stories (to me, at least) is "Emergency," which is truly nothing short of a contemporary masterpiece. It begins with a man wandering into a hospital emergency room with a knife in his eye, and ends with two hospital workers driving aimlessly in the country while caring for near-dead baby rabbits. I'll give away nothing else, but brace yourself: the dialogue is hilarious and the portrayal of the medical establishment (in all its humanness) isn't too flattering. And the ironies and complexities of the book's title will keep your mind active long after you've completed the last sentence. In short, a great book, highly recommended!

I originally bought this novella in '98 for a quick book report in high school. I was going to spread out my efforts over a week. I read the first story and devoured the book twice in the first night.

I'm a creative writing minor at Chico State University, California. If I were to state any influences, Dennis Johnson--and especially this book--would be it. He writes in a poetic-prose that's hypnotizing. When I dug into the first paragraph of "Hitchhiking in the Rain," I was the cobra and Johnson was the flutist.

In short, if you like gritty, drug laden prose, buy this book. If not, go back to your Anne Rice novels and leave the true lovers of literature to their devices.