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Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson
(Review: September 2005) Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson is one of the great modern day collections of short
stories. It’s right up there with Where I’m Calling From by
Raymond Carver, any collection by John Cheaver, J. D. Salinger’s Nine
Stories, Winner Take Nothing by Ernest Hemingway and Everything
that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor. It’s spare, poetic and
haunting. Each line of prose is crafted with artistry and care. The eleven
tales, which unfurl through out the Midwest and Pacific Northwest during the
1970s and 80s, revolve around the antics of beautiful losers: those a hair
above hardened drug addicts and derelicts, always on the edge, a dollar short
and one step away from personal ruin. A few of the cast of colorful
characters find their way into more than one weave, and each story is
narrated by the same character as he makes his way chronologically from point
A to point B. The most heralded yarn is Emergency, about an
idiot-savant orderly who dips into the hospital’s drug supply, but the tales
that resonate most from the heart are Work, about two down and outers
foraging for cash to get their kicks, uncovering vestiges of their former,
and more secure lives, and Two Men, a weave of drunkenness and fateful
happenstance in the Pacific Northwest night. Johnson imprints
a culture and time in the same exquisite fashion that O’Connor captured the
South. And the author proves to have great care for his characters too. The
stakes are high and the reader is always right there with the protagonist,
where Johnson skillfully places them. Jesus’s Son is a rare
collection. Its only flaw is that it goes too quickly (150 short pages). And
if you’ve ever seen the movie, don’t judge the book by its celluloid cousin;
it does Johnson’s artistry a disservice. The only movie to be made masterfully
of a master writer’s collection of shorts was Carver’s Short Cuts–and
that was directed by Robert Altman, a cinematic master in his own right. - TBM |
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