Country: USA
Genre: Literary/Crime
Pages: 133
Synopsis:
Eleven stories of sadness and longing, from award winning author Denis Johnson. They examine the dynamics of addiction and existential solitude.
*Recommended by Keith Rawson
There were many moments in the Vine like that one - where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons.
I didn't know who Denis Johnson was before this year's Pulitzer Prize fiasco. His novella TRAIN DREAMS was shortlisted for the much coveted literary award, alongside David Foster Wallace's swansong THE PALE KING and Karen Russell's SWAMPLANDIA! All three of them bit the dust, due to a strange exercise of democracy from the jury. Award nominations serve their purpose, though and right after the Pulitzer dropped the ball, I found myself having many discussions about Denis Johnson over Twitter. JESUS' SON was recommended to me as the perfect tryout book for Johnson's literature. Tryout turned out to be the keyword, here. The stories are beautiful and yet so spare, it's hard to make a definitive opinion about the author from reading JESUS' SON.
My favorite story in the collection was EMERGENCY, which follows the professional lives of orderlies/paramedic guys (their specific role in the hospital is never explicitly mentioned), through a small portions of their lives. Their motivations to work among the sick and the wounded are investigated by Denis Johnson and the beauty of it is the subtlety of how it's brought up. The narrator and his friend Georgie both have very different reasons to do what they do and yet, they never confront their beliefs in an obvious way. The essence of who they are seeps through the pages and comes to a knockout punch conclusion that goes way beyond the walls of the hospital they work in. Johnson does that very well. He starts in a realistic setting and expands into more abstract questions as the story progresses. It's very atypical writing. Usually, what writer do is they make their philosophical point and make a realistic example afterwards. The way Johnson structures his story makes them very potent, lasting. EMERGENCY is not the only story that uses this model.
Other stories stood out of the lot. OUT ON BAIL, which told the story of Jack Hotel, a young hoodlum being trialed for armed robbery. The trial isn't going very well and the outcome is inevitable. Johnson captures his last moments of freedom, alongside his always anonymous narrator. He seizes that indescribable feeling of fleeing liberty. Of life, about to never be the same again. WORK also struck a chord with me, too. It's the story of an abusive relationship, clouded by heroin abuse. The two protagonist tear each other apart, but keep gravitating back towards each other for a simple reason. The need. Not all the stories worked well for me, I thought some were very impersonal and distant. TWO MEN or DIRTY WEDDING for example. Johnson's ethereal pen didn't seize anything precise on these. Or at least, nothing tangible to me. It's fine, I don't expect every story in a collection to have optimal power.
I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony 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 of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.
I'm still unsure if I'm a Denis Johnson fan or not. JESUS' SON was a pleasant reading overall, but I closed the book unsatisfied, intrigued and slightly frustrated, like I had just finished a book which had the last ten pages torn out. Since then, reading more Denis Johnson has been a recurring, haunting idea., so I suppose it's a good thing that JESUS' SON didn't wrap things up. Johnson is a stylist, a minimalist who has his own ideas, his own aesthetic, but who you can ultimately trace back to Raymond Carver. You could say one's a logical evolution from the other. He sure is one intriguing cat. JESUS' SON is a short read, so it's not a big monetary or time investment and Denis Johnson is worth looking into. He's a great stylist, who explores the darker questions of existence. There are not enough of these guys.
THREE STARS