Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A long, moody bus ride of a book., 4 Feb 1997
By A Customer
These are the stories like Raymond Carver would write if he had this kind of vision and gift with words. Johnson is a poet, turned prose writer. His novel, Fiskadoro, is a feat of imagination; he conceives a new, post-apocalypse world and he invents a new vocabulary and syntax to go with it. This collection of short stories is even better. And don't sniff at the title--Jesus' Son--these stories are entirely legitimate. Most were published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, or Esquire. Several were selected for the "Best Short Stories of..," where I first came across them.
The character are low, mostly drunks, addicts, and users. The setting is the west, Seattle or Tuscon. A lot of the tales begin, and end, at the Vine, a dive bar downtown.
In the story Work, two friends earn their drinking money by pulling the copper wire out of an abandoned house; not a burglary, one points out, but a salvage job. They watch in amazement from the attic as a woman skis by,nude,her red-hair streaming behind her. It may be a dream, one character suspects, but its turning out to be one of the best days of his life.
In another story, a young man hides in the bushes to spy on a young house wife as she showers. He admits how low this is, but he expect to go lower. He returns every day of the summer, hoping to catch the woman and her husband in the act. He sees something entirely different.
Emergency is my favorite of the collection. A man walks into the hospital with a knife in his eye socket,lodged there by his wife. An orderly, stoned after indiscriminately sampling the hospital's pharamcopia,casually removes the knife while the frantic surgeons are still scrubbing. Driving around later with a friend, they run over a pregnant rabbit. "We killed the mother, but saved the babies," one rejoices. They get lost in a snow storm, and find themselves at an empty drive-in, the speakers all squawking.
Not all the stories are this grim or bleak. And even at their blackest, they are funny. Mostly they are visionary, and beautiful. But its a dilated vision, over real and harsh. If "Leaving Las Vegas" left you cold, so will this collection.
Reading Johnson feels like a visit to an acupunturist; he chooses his words precisely, like needles, to stir dead feelings and revive your imagination.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ignore Me, 2 Oct 2004
I had heard great things about this guy, but was never keen. The synopses put me off, and the back cover did the same for me this time. I'm glad I ignored myself. Yes, it is a tale of junkies and losers, but the riffing is infectious. What elevates it beyond a style exercise, is what elevates all writing to the level of literature. Laced through the text are gems about what it is to be alive - they stop you and send you back to savour them a second, third time, and two pages on, you find yourself flipping back yet again. Ignoring myself once more, it's not about junkies, it's about me.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
chemicals and religious connotations, 30 Jun 2002
Meandering through a minefield of metaphors, obscure similies and thought-provoking observations, Jesus' Son takes the reader on a trek through the dark and, at times, seedy past of the hero, known only as F*** Head - presumably Mr. Johnson's former self before turning his hand to writing. A bleak and at the same time nihilistic journey of an American drifter, down the path of lost hope and self destruction. Denis Johnson's prose is filled with a sensitivity which somehow manages to bypass sentimentality and is both irritating and sleazy, yet somehow beautiful and awe-inspiring. For these stories alone (somehow his other works seem to fall into the banal category of "another novel by...") Mr. Johnson should earn his place alongside other American greats such as Richard Brautigan, Richard Price and Whitely Strieber.
Personally I was given Jesus' Son many years before the unfortunate celluloid version was produced and it has since been one of the few literary treasures I have come to rely upon as a bible.
---- similar reads: Ladies' Man - Richard Price, Billy - Whitley Strieber, Sombrero Fallout - Richard Brautigan
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