Vera's review
status:
Read in February, 2008
Jesus' Son is a collection of short stories or anecdotes all told from the first person who is usually high or tripping on something. The stories are bizarre moments in between hallucination and reality, confusion and enlightenment. I had heard great things about Denis Johnson and I have to say I was under whelmed. There were moments of clarity and beauty in each of those stories but those moments were fleeting and were not quite good enough to make up for the mediocrity that was the rest of the book. The narrators "enhanced" state allows him to make strange and inconsistent statements that we the reader are supposed to interpret and find deeper meaning in. I think having a character high throughout a book is great opportunity to rant incoherently and end up concluding something brilliant. However it was as if Johnson was pretending to be insightful but left it up to the reader to think of anything actually deep. While I respect the decision to make the reader do some ...more
Jesus' Son is a collection of short stories or anecdotes all told from the first person who is usually high or tripping on something. The stories are bizarre moments in between hallucination and reality, confusion and enlightenment. I had heard great things about Denis Johnson and I have to say I was under whelmed. There were moments of clarity and beauty in each of those stories but those moments were fleeting and were not quite good enough to make up for the mediocrity that was the rest of the book. The narrators "enhanced" state allows him to make strange and inconsistent statements that we the reader are supposed to interpret and find deeper meaning in. I think having a character high throughout a book is great opportunity to rant incoherently and end up concluding something brilliant. However it was as if Johnson was pretending to be insightful but left it up to the reader to think of anything actually deep. While I respect the decision to make the reader do some work in order to fully appreciate a text, and I respect the decision to leave words up for interpretation, I also believe that the writing has to be unbelievably good in order to get away with that. Johnson’s writing did not blow me away and ultimately I found his often-incoherent sentences to be pretentious and meaningless. I realize how harsh that sounds and I want to clarify that I was not miserable reading the text. It was very entertaining and as I said I found brief moments of greatness. I did however feel satisfied at the end of this book....less
Jesus' Son: Stories 
