John's review
Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson
by Denis Johnson
The problem isn't Jesus' Son. It's that you're taking classes and worrying about Harold Bloom. Come on. How can you like anything under those circumstances?
The academic environment was a problem, but Jesus' Son was a bigger one. I came out of college liking plenty of books. This wasn't one of them.
So John, what's your real problem with this type of collection of stories? That they aren't linear, that they don't have heroic plots with classic story structure, that they have to do with drug use? Your review doesn't help me know whether I would or wouldn't like this book, because all you do is complain in vague tones.
You call it hip and pretentious. That tells me you felt inadequate when you read it. But I could be getting the wrong message. Could you explain?
We may be at an impasse if you read, "I’m a reader and a thinking person, and both identities were insulted," and thought I felt inadequate. However, I'll take another crack at this:
It's not entertaining. It's not enlightening. It's not fulfilling, engaging or intellectually arousing. The prose is pretentious and often aimless or sloppy. There was a definite sense there should have been rhythm in the voice but it failed to emerge in story after story. I could not care about any of the characters - the narrator, "Fuckhead," is too disjointed and hollow, and the others were cloyingly fake or barely even drawn up. These stories not only lacked "heroic" plots, but almost any plot. When things happened they almost just happened; a car crash has no emotional impact, tearing apart the house made me roll my eyes, and yes, the drug use is cloying. The lack of direction would be fine if Johnson's prose offered something else in the absences. Haruki Murakami can make a plotless scene great with random dialogue. Nicholson Baker can fill a plotless or thinly plotted scene with interesting observations. Johnson didn't do anything of note. He did not elicit emotion except disgust for the author's poor attempts at profoundness through depressing material and passivity. The alternating dull and cloyingly artificial execution of the awful things that happen, and the miniscule meaning Johnson actually makes out of them, downright insulted me.
My problem is not with this type of collection of short stories. A collection of short stories that are loosely connected by a central character seems like a fine notion (and Hemingway did that quite well with Nick Adams). A bunch of short stories where random stuff happens could also be quite interesting - in the hands of another author. My problems are with this book.
Cool, thanks! That helps a whole lot more. I like Nicholson Baker a lot and relating Johnson to him helps me understand what you're driving at. Maybe you're someone who doesn't have much experience, either yourself or through watching friends, with drug use and abuse. Or maybe Johnson just writes poorly and the only virtue is that he writes autobiographically and ironically, with a character "Fuckhead" being a thinly veiled disguise for Johnson himself, and irony being in the label given the character. The things you describe as bothering you are things that I have experienced myself through drug use and abuse, and through depression. Sometimes it's hard to relate to things you haven't been through personally, or been affected by personally. But your review makes tons more sense to me now, I really appreciate the clarification. Thanks.
John's review
Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson by Denis Johnson
John's review
rating:
recommended for: Literary readers who've read all the good books
I wouldn’t dislike this book so much if professors and literati hadn’t rubbed it in my face so much. Don't get me wrong - it wasn't entertaining, enlightening, intellectually arousing, and it didn't harbor any interesting characters or compelling scenes despite dealing with drugs, physical handicaps and multiple deaths. The narrator was far too pretentious with far too little beautiful writing or insight to pull it off. I was mostly bored or depressed, and occasionally outraged and how poorly written sections were, and even handed it to other students just to see if I’d gone insane – only to find they were equally unimpressed. But when you get someone like Yale’s Harold Bloom fondling it like a new-age Bible, I tend to lose it. This is a collection of short stories just tragically hip enough, just sad and bleak enough, just pretentious enough to be cuddled by literary-types. When Johnson isn’t failing on sentence-by-sentence level, he utterly fails to deliver story, compell...more
The problem isn't Jesus' Son. It's that you're taking classes and worrying about Harold Bloom. Come on. How can you like anything under those circumstances?
The academic environment was a problem, but Jesus' Son was a bigger one. I came out of college liking plenty of books. This wasn't one of them.
So John, what's your real problem with this type of collection of stories? That they aren't linear, that they don't have heroic plots with classic story structure, that they have to do with drug use? Your review doesn't help me know whether I would or wouldn't like this book, because all you do is complain in vague tones. You call it hip and pretentious. That tells me you felt inadequate when you read it. But I could be getting the wrong message. Could you explain?
We may be at an impasse if you read, "I’m a reader and a thinking person, and both identities were insulted," and thought I felt inadequate. However, I'll take another crack at this:
It's not entertaining. It's not enlightening. It's not fulfilling, engaging or intellectually arousing. The prose is pretentious and often aimless or sloppy. There was a definite sense there should have been rhythm in the voice but it failed to emerge in story after story. I could not care about any of the characters - the narrator, "Fuckhead," is too disjointed and hollow, and the others were cloyingly fake or barely even drawn up. These stories not only lacked "heroic" plots, but almost any plot. When things happened they almost just happened; a car crash has no emotional impact, tearing apart the house made me roll my eyes, and yes, the drug use is cloying. The lack of direction would be fine if Johnson's prose offered something else in the absences. Haruki Murakami can make a plotless scene great with random dialogue. Nicholson Baker can fill a plotless or thinly plotted scene with interesting observations. Johnson didn't do anything of note. He did not elicit emotion except disgust for the author's poor attempts at profoundness through depressing material and passivity. The alternating dull and cloyingly artificial execution of the awful things that happen, and the miniscule meaning Johnson actually makes out of them, downright insulted me.
My problem is not with this type of collection of short stories. A collection of short stories that are loosely connected by a central character seems like a fine notion (and Hemingway did that quite well with Nick Adams). A bunch of short stories where random stuff happens could also be quite interesting - in the hands of another author. My problems are with this book.
Cool, thanks! That helps a whole lot more. I like Nicholson Baker a lot and relating Johnson to him helps me understand what you're driving at. Maybe you're someone who doesn't have much experience, either yourself or through watching friends, with drug use and abuse. Or maybe Johnson just writes poorly and the only virtue is that he writes autobiographically and ironically, with a character "Fuckhead" being a thinly veiled disguise for Johnson himself, and irony being in the label given the character. The things you describe as bothering you are things that I have experienced myself through drug use and abuse, and through depression. Sometimes it's hard to relate to things you haven't been through personally, or been affected by personally. But your review makes tons more sense to me now, I really appreciate the clarification. Thanks.