From the Publisher
"Reading these stories is like reading ticker tape from the subconscious."—
The Nation
"A work of spare beauty and almost religious intensity."—Entertainment Weekly
"Intense, vicious, and beautiful, these stories are fraught with a cutting wit purposefully juxtaposed against the too-big sentimentality of a drunk. Denis Johnson is an exquisite writer."—Mary Gaitskill
"[Dennis Johnson is] a synthesizer of profoundly American voices: we can hear Twain in his biting irony, Whitman in his erotic excess, not a little of Dashiell Hammett too in the hard sentences he throws back at his gouged, wounded world. And behind all these you sense something else: a visionary angel, a Kerouac, or, better yet, a Blake, who has seen his demon and yearned for God and forged a language to contain them both."—Newsday
"Ferocious intensity. . . . No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked 'insensitivity' in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction."—The New York Times Book Review
L.A. Weekly
In a world of predictable fiction, Jesus' Son is a point-blank godsend.
New York Times Book Review
His prose. . .consistently gnerations imagery of ferocious intensity, much of it shaded with a menacing, even deranged sense of humor. No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked 'insensitivity' in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction.
Newsday
Denis Johnson is an amazingly talented writer, a synthesizer of profoundly American voices: We can hear Twain in his biting irony, Whitman in his erotic excess, not a little of Dashiell Hammett too in the hard sentences he throws back at his gouged, wounded world. And behind all these you sense something else: a visionary angel, a Kerouac or, better yet, a Blake, who has seen his demon and yearned for God and forged a language to contain them both.
Marianne Wiggins
Reading these stories is like reading ticker tape from the subconscious. —The Nation
Atlantic Monthly
Denis Johnson's path as a writer—from poetry to the novel to the short story—is an untypical as his vision, but Jesus' Son may eventually be read not just as a moment in his evolution but as a distinctive turn in the history of the form. He is doing something deeply new in these stories, and the formal novelty brings us into a new intimacy with the violence that is rising around us in this country like the killing waters of a flood.
Michiko Kakutani
The narrator of these interlinked stories is a young man, reelig from his addiction to heroin and alcohol, his mind at once clouded and made gorgeously lucid by these drugs. Dreams blur into real life for this man, hallucinations mimic and merge with reality: a state of affairs that gives Mr. Johnson ample opportunity to display his dazzling gift for poetic language, his natural instinct for metaphor and wordplay. —New York Times
Los Angeles Times
Denis Johnson's most accessible and accomplished book, from start to finish, without a single sentence that misses the mark.
Madison Smartt Bell
These tales are told with apparent carelesness, a kind of grinding realism which would suggest that these events are as purposeless as they seem. But at heart Johnson is a metaphysician, and through the luminous windows that startlingly open in the deadpan prose. . .we are bystanders to an act of testimony. —USA Today
Mary Gaitskill
Intense, vicious, and beautiful, these storeis are fraught with a cutting wit purposefully juxtaposed against the too-big sentimentality of a drunk. Denis Johnson is an exquisite writer.
Entertainment Weekly
A work of spare beauty and almost religious intensity.
People
Johnson has the distinction of being both a poet and a novelist of gritty realism who uses language like a paring knofe to slice through to the bones of his subject matter....[These stories] are as muscular and tight as a washboard stomach, as resonant as a drum.
Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
Taking its title from a line in Lou Reed's notorious song ``Heroin,'' this story collection by with-it novelist Johnson focuses on the familiar themes of addiction and recovery. In his novels, Johnson has shown his ability to transform the commonplace into the extraordinary, but this volume of 11 stories is no better than, and often seems inferior to, the self-destruction/spiritual rehab books currently crowding bookstore shelves. All of the tales, set in the Midwest and West, are told by a single narrator, and while this should provide unity and depth, instead it makes the stories fragmentary and monotonous. Some disturbing moments do recall Johnson at his inventive best, as when a peeping Tom catches sight of a Mennonite man washing his wife's feet after a marital spat in ``Beverly Home,'' or when the narrator 'fesses up to his fright in a confrontation with the boyfriend--``a mean, skinny, intelligent man who I happened to feel inferior to''--of a woman he's fondling in ``Two Men.'' But for the most part the stories are neurasthenic, as though Johnson hopes the shock value of characters fatally overdosing in the presence of lovers and friends will substitute for creativity and hard work from him. Even the dialogue for the most part lacks Johnson's usual energy.
Publishers Weekly
Will Patton, award-winning reader of Johnson’s oeuvre, brings to life his dark, drug-addled, tragicomic world. Each short story offers another vista on a lost, sorrowful American underworld where recurring characters stumble through dive bars, dead-end relationships, emergency rooms, car crashes, and petty crimes. Patton’s narration is pitch perfect; he produces voices for a collection of gritty, bent souls who spend their lost days riding buses, hitchhiking, breaking into abandoned houses, drinking at the Vine, and stealing pills from the hospital dispensary. An absolute must for Johnson fans and a fine introduction to the author’s work. A Picador paperback. (Oct.)
Library Journal
Set in the Midwest and West, these aggressively grim stories are linked by a common narrator--a young, nameless substance abuser of unspecified background and education. Like the other marginal and directionless individuals who populate these tales, he is locked into a downward spiral of booze, drugs, and petty crime, the squalor of his life emblematic of a more profound spiritual malaise. The best pieces--like ``Beverly Home,'' which concerns a recovering addict who spies on a Mennonite couple through their bedroom window, and ``Car Crash While Hitchhiking,'' which is exactly what the title implies--balance longing with despair, revealing the yearning for a kind of meaning ultimately lost to these lives. Johnson writes with hallucinatory brilliance, giving these stories a nightmarish edge. Bleak and disturbing, they are not for the faint-hearted.-- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
New York Times Books of the Century
...[A] tour de force of compression and moral entropy....even the sense of humor here seems deranged...all part of the admirable, startling art of this fearless detective of the tortured paths of Americans' moral lives.
