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Jesus' Son
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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. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son of
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Mass Market Paperback, 160 pages
Published
December 15th 1993
by Harper Perennial
(first published 1992)
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I once fell in love with a man just because he recommended this book to me. He had a glass eye and fingernails with with half moons of crust lodged underneath, thick and dark as coffee grounds. He was living covertly and temporarily for about four years in one of those storage units out by the interstate, and I would sometimes go see him when I wanted to get high or feel better about my life. At some point he died when they blew up a bridge to build a dam, and he happened to be sleeping undernea
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"I could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched."
Magnificent, concise writing. A calm sort of sad, and strangely relaxing. Stories about people living in the corners of society.
It’s like I’m sitting on the porch of a shack in the middle of nowhere, listening to the saddest old man I know tell me misremembered stories about how shitty he was when he was young.
It all feels extremely real, like lives that were lived. The stories are connected, and all share a ...more
Magnificent, concise writing. A calm sort of sad, and strangely relaxing. Stories about people living in the corners of society.
It’s like I’m sitting on the porch of a shack in the middle of nowhere, listening to the saddest old man I know tell me misremembered stories about how shitty he was when he was young.
It all feels extremely real, like lives that were lived. The stories are connected, and all share a ...more
In the psychedelic world everything is surreal… Everything is blurred…
In the phantasmagoric surroundings even hopes and pursuits turn surreal…
The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts. My thoughts zoomed pitifully. The traveling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened.
In the phantasmagoric surroundings even hopes and pursuits turn surreal…
And with each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who’d love m...more
A poetic, disorienting book of short fiction about semi-criminals, heroin addicts and idlers squandering their lives on the fringes of urban northern Idaho.
The narrator is a study in contrasts: irresponsible, irrational . . . and yet gifted with moments of almost mystical clarity.
Posted at Shelf Inflicted
I wasn’t sure if I would like this collection of loosely connected stories about a young guy who is addicted to drugs, sometimes homeless, sometimes employed, and occasionally steals. He’s not an especially likable character, but I enjoyed being a part of his thoughts, his views, and his haphazard journey through life. Maybe it's because I have empathy for addicts and others who live on the edge.
This powerful and gripping collection of stories was troubling, intense, an ...more
I wasn’t sure if I would like this collection of loosely connected stories about a young guy who is addicted to drugs, sometimes homeless, sometimes employed, and occasionally steals. He’s not an especially likable character, but I enjoyed being a part of his thoughts, his views, and his haphazard journey through life. Maybe it's because I have empathy for addicts and others who live on the edge.
This powerful and gripping collection of stories was troubling, intense, an ...more
Jesus walks here, among the degenerates, the drunks, the addicts, the living dead that populate the pages of this collection of very short, connected stories. You'll see him in beautiful moments, outstretched hands seeking redemption, the presence of an unlikely trinity of down and outers.
Yes, Jesus. Even though the title refers to lyrics in Lou Reed's song, "Heroin". Jesus and heroin are mixed here. A potent, jarring combination.
The same character who spends his sober evenings as a peeping tom ...more
Yes, Jesus. Even though the title refers to lyrics in Lou Reed's song, "Heroin". Jesus and heroin are mixed here. A potent, jarring combination.
The same character who spends his sober evenings as a peeping tom ...more
*I'm heartbroken to hear of Denis Johnson's recent passing. The man was a personal hero and great literary influence of mine. I'm floating this review of his quintessential masterpiece as a tip of the hat to an exceptional author who brought us some of the finest prose.
Without a doubt, this is one of my favorite works of all time. Denis Johnson is a major influence of mine, and Jesus' Son had a profound effect on me.
This was the book that showed me how far you could stretch your prose and stil ...more
Without a doubt, this is one of my favorite works of all time. Denis Johnson is a major influence of mine, and Jesus' Son had a profound effect on me.
This was the book that showed me how far you could stretch your prose and stil ...more
Jun 16, 2013
Garima
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
s.penkevich
I stayed in the library, crushed breathless by the smoldering power of all those words—many of them unfathomable.
Sometimes I judge and consequently love a book based upon the following points:
- A single, beautiful line I longed to read or hear in the words of some person other than me.
- A completely related character.
- A completely unrelated character.
- The way it makes me laugh.
- The way it makes me cry.
- The way it makes me feel extremely good about the life I’m leading.
- The way it makes me ...more
"I'd been staying at the holiday Inn with my girl-
friend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd
ever known, for three days under a phoney name,
shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate
steaks at the restaurant, shot up in the john,
puked, cried, accused one another, begged one
another, forgave, promised, and carried one an-
other to heaven."
Read a couple of Johnson's novels in the past and thought they were good but not great. These short-stories however were the real deal, and most of them total ...more
Junk-sick, Broke and Completely Alone, in a Land of Bad Intentions
I've gone through three copies of ‘Jesus’ Son’, reading it like a prayer-book, though it’s nothing of the kind. There's a sadness living in every sentence, and it doesn't really have any suggestions for better living, beyond a painfully obvious cautionary tale. Heroin=bad.
The cautionary tale, however, is one interpreted by the reader. It's the best kind of dangerous, like a manual for poetic self-immolation, on burning yourse ...more
I've gone through three copies of ‘Jesus’ Son’, reading it like a prayer-book, though it’s nothing of the kind. There's a sadness living in every sentence, and it doesn't really have any suggestions for better living, beyond a painfully obvious cautionary tale. Heroin=bad.
The cautionary tale, however, is one interpreted by the reader. It's the best kind of dangerous, like a manual for poetic self-immolation, on burning yourse ...more
I kind of sort of liked this woozy teensy bouquet of junkie memories but it was just too oh what’s the word even though the very sky above me was heavy with the five stars sluiced over this book by all previous readers in all the seven realms of readerdom.
I got a mean and unworthy thought – that you could take sentences from almost anywhere in any of these stories and put them next to other randomly selected sentences and they would make as much sense, so I took something from page 20, 40, 80, ...more
I got a mean and unworthy thought – that you could take sentences from almost anywhere in any of these stories and put them next to other randomly selected sentences and they would make as much sense, so I took something from page 20, 40, 80, ...more
Denis Johnson took the fringe sensibilities of The Beats, added his own raw poetic touches, nicked a line from Lou Reed for the title, and ended up with an intensely unsettling collection of stories that prefigured to a T the drug classic Trainspotting. You may wonder at first if the unnamed narrator of these accounts could really be such an uncaring cad. Well, as a bottom line, maybe so. But the thoughts of murder, the thieving, and the ultra-callous disregard for fellow man were in large part
...more
Excellent prose & a roaming plot to boot. These short stories together describe the grit inherent in modern America. We meet drunks & druggies, victims of crime and a vicious environment. America is rarely portrayed like this-- with so much beauty & ugliness combined. Books like these make me feel bad for hating on The Poets. This is poetic &, despite its brevity, confoundingly major. You want to read more of the narrator's misadventures: it is as addictive to the voracious reader as the drugs a
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“All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”
― Denis Johnson, 'Jesus' Son'
Sometimes while reading this I thought I was reading Burroughs (just not so dark), other times J.G. Ballard (just not so cold), sometimes even Palahniuk (but with more of a poet's heart). It was madness, a fever dream, tied together with beauty. It was fragments of insanity s ...more
― Denis Johnson, 'Jesus' Son'
Sometimes while reading this I thought I was reading Burroughs (just not so dark), other times J.G. Ballard (just not so cold), sometimes even Palahniuk (but with more of a poet's heart). It was madness, a fever dream, tied together with beauty. It was fragments of insanity s ...more
Look, I don't know how else to put this. I recognize what Johnson's accomplished here, I acknowledge that he has a gift for phrase-level shine, and I concede that these semi-linked stories evince a remarkably coherent and vividly-depicted worldview that I might call "hopelessly optimistic," or maybe "tending to carry on when there's clearly no good reason to do so," or else, more succinctly, "Conradian" . . . but, I'm sorry, what I couldn't help but think/feel, wading through one after another o
...more
This book ruined my reading bone for a long time. I wanted every story I read, every story by every other author, to be just like the stories in Jesus' Son. But of course they weren't and aren't and they stand alone in my mind, even now. Perhaps it's the whiskey talking, but I'd go so far as to call this little book one of the greatest of my generation. Not that such superlatives carry any weight anymore. I just can't get over this book. It was my first true love.
To find Rick Bass's words of praise in the opening pages, speaking about this great 50,000-volt kick thrill of a book, I knew that this would be just the thing to cure my reading inertia. I'd followed a Carson McCullers novel like a dream into the rabbit hole, shrunk and dreamed until This One woke me like a cruel Queen. Consider me awake.
Not unlike characters from the early works of McCarthy, the faces that come in and out of focus in Denis Johnson's fictional world are victims of their own mi ...more
Is there a way of writing the right stories about the right people,telling everything neatly from start to finish. An Uppercase letter starting the story and a full stop waiting at the end. A boy meeting girl on the first page and walking away with her in the last one.
Or are stories like these...snapshots of nightmares which some would call hell, but is home to some. Where beautiful sentences strike you out of the blue, so beautiful that you read them again and again, flashes of lightning in a d ...more
Or are stories like these...snapshots of nightmares which some would call hell, but is home to some. Where beautiful sentences strike you out of the blue, so beautiful that you read them again and again, flashes of lightning in a d ...more
Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/
And when it comes to fiction a bigly chunk of “my” people are drug addicts . . . .
Jesus’ Son has been on my TBR for an age due to the fact that it is considered a modern classic and has appeared on list after list of must reads that I can’t ever stop myself from looking at, despite having 11,000,000,000,000 books already waiting for me to get to them. I can’t guarantee everyone will love this one – due to the aforementioned dr ...more
And when it comes to fiction a bigly chunk of “my” people are drug addicts . . . .
Jesus’ Son has been on my TBR for an age due to the fact that it is considered a modern classic and has appeared on list after list of must reads that I can’t ever stop myself from looking at, despite having 11,000,000,000,000 books already waiting for me to get to them. I can’t guarantee everyone will love this one – due to the aforementioned dr ...more
Nov 19, 2016
Alex
rated it
it was amazing
Recommends it for:
people with shitty nicknames
Shelves:
2016
Last Exit to Brooklyn in the boonies is what Jesus' Son feels like. It's an interconnected series of short stories starring the very down and very out in rural Iowa as they stagger through young adulthood. Its protagonist's name is Fuckhead, so there you go.
There's this great confused quality that's familiar to me from my own experimental days, which were much less dire (not at all dire) but, like, in one story they're all having a sendoff party for a friend who's going to jail, and midway throu ...more
There's this great confused quality that's familiar to me from my own experimental days, which were much less dire (not at all dire) but, like, in one story they're all having a sendoff party for a friend who's going to jail, and midway throu ...more
Nov 15, 2007
John Wiswell
rated it
did not like it
Recommends it 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 wr
...more
This collection of stories is really short, but don’t let that fool you. Each word releases so much power that an hour spent reading Jesus’ Son carries the same impact as two hours of reading another book. Johnson throws off images like dazzling pieces of shrapnel, and for me, those gorgeous passages are what held the book together more than any actual plot.
The narrator is a junkie with a life so chaotic that you always have the feeling anything could happen at any second. He might see an angel, ...more
The narrator is a junkie with a life so chaotic that you always have the feeling anything could happen at any second. He might see an angel, ...more
God I loved this. A perfect collection of short stories. Fuckhead is in his early twenties and he's a drug addict and alcoholic. And no, a series of stories about drug-fuelled craziness narrated by this kind of man, wouldn't normally interest me, either. But the free-wheeling mind-altered narratives are so fresh and scary, and sometimes even funny. Don't be put off by the subject matter, just read it.
The novelization of the Mountain Goats album We Shall All Be Healed. Or We Shall All Be Healed is actually Jesus' Son: The Musical!. Either way.
_____
Note:
In "The Art of Reading Denis Johnson" (Poets and Writers, Nov/Dec 2013, pgs. 23-27), the guest columnist suggests that the line I knew every raindrop by its name is symptomatic of a "want of Wordsworthian affinity for the natural world, or a groping after a kind of Buddhist cohesion with the cosmos..."
I call bullshit on this Boston University ...more
_____
Note:
In "The Art of Reading Denis Johnson" (Poets and Writers, Nov/Dec 2013, pgs. 23-27), the guest columnist suggests that the line I knew every raindrop by its name is symptomatic of a "want of Wordsworthian affinity for the natural world, or a groping after a kind of Buddhist cohesion with the cosmos..."
I call bullshit on this Boston University ...more
Jan 29, 2020
Pedro
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
sweet-nightmares-and-awful-dreams
1. Car Crash While Hitchhiking
“He couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”
2. Two Men
“It doesn’t matter what his problem is, until he’s fully understood it himself.”
3. Out of Bail
“Some of the most terrible things that had happened to me in my life had happened in here. But like the others I kept coming back.”
4. Dundun
“For a moment I fell asleep, right while I was driving. I had a dream in which I was trying to tell someone something and they kept interrupting ...more
“He couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”
2. Two Men
“It doesn’t matter what his problem is, until he’s fully understood it himself.”
3. Out of Bail
“Some of the most terrible things that had happened to me in my life had happened in here. But like the others I kept coming back.”
4. Dundun
“For a moment I fell asleep, right while I was driving. I had a dream in which I was trying to tell someone something and they kept interrupting ...more
Dennis Johnson has a good way to describe things and has placed trouble riddled characters amongst some literal beauty.
A collection of stories tied together with a common theme of struggle and drugs.
He brings your eyes into the lives of characters on this earth with problems.
The few stories I mention are...
Car crash while hitchhiking
As the title say a powerful descriptive story where a hitchhiker is involved in an accident with a family including a baby.
Visceral and shows very well all that ...more
A collection of stories tied together with a common theme of struggle and drugs.
He brings your eyes into the lives of characters on this earth with problems.
The few stories I mention are...
Car crash while hitchhiking
As the title say a powerful descriptive story where a hitchhiker is involved in an accident with a family including a baby.
Visceral and shows very well all that ...more
A hallucinagenic fairytale about a lost soul in the 1970s, a man who feels too much, sees too much, experiences too much, where pleasure and pain intermingle. Stunning prose, astonishing insights. Read this is you're looking for something different and exceptional.
What’s the deal with great writers and drugs and/or alcohol? It seems most of my favorite writers start out with amazing talent and then slowly fizzle out under the weight of some form of substance abuse. Patrick Hamilton, Carson McCullers, Richard Yates... (add your own).
In my book, Denis Johnson is turning out to be an inverse exception to the rule. For most of his twenties, Johnson was addicted to drugs and alcohol but he quit drinking alcohol in 1978 and quit recreational drugs in 1983 and t ...more
In my book, Denis Johnson is turning out to be an inverse exception to the rule. For most of his twenties, Johnson was addicted to drugs and alcohol but he quit drinking alcohol in 1978 and quit recreational drugs in 1983 and t ...more
I love a no-skip story collection. This was excellent!
I re-read this book in June 2017 because Denis Johnson died at the end of May 2017 and it felt appropriate to mark that somehow. He has written several books that I admire but Jesus' Son is one of those books where the language re-wires your brain as you read it and you come out of it a different person than you were when you started it. And it only takes a couple of hours to read, so that suggests a pretty intense experience. And it is.
The New York Times says it: "is his fifth book of fiction, ...more
The New York Times says it: "is his fifth book of fiction, ...more
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Ink to Film B...: Jesus' Son Discussion | 1 | 10 | Feb 14, 2019 10:34AM | |
| Treinar em casa | 1 | 3 | Jan 29, 2018 10:57AM | |
| A Great Collection of Short Stories | 1 | 9 | Oct 15, 2017 10:11PM |
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Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer's Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently, t
...more
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“I knew every raindrop by its name.”
—
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“And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”
—
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