Denis Johnson's Jesus Son

It is no accident that Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son opens with a bloody, fatal car wreck on a rainy two-lane highway under a spread of “Midwestern clouds like great grey brains.” This incident from “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” sets the stage and the tone for what follows: a series of head-on collisions that Johnson’s narrator—an on-the-run junkie—encounters over the course of eleven electrifying stories. Johnson hurls his readers on a shotgunned journey through emergency rooms and dope dens, detoxification wards and rest homes for those whose “impossible deformities…made God look like a senseless maniac.” The world of Jesus’ Son is a place, a purgatory of sorts, where “the rapist met his victim, the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be healed.” These are the kinds of moments around which Denis Johnson shapes stones that are destined not only to linger but to last, moments that once they are lived through (for to read this book is to live through it) will never—an never-be forgotten.

In Jesus’ Son, Johnson breaks narrative rules and conventions with the candor of a strung-out junkie pawning off his mother’s jewelry box in order to cop a quick fix. Standard trademarks of the genre, such as telling a straightforward story (with an Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end), have
At times, most flagrantly in his third novel, The Stars at Noon (1986), Johnson’s Christian impulses turn into moments of rhetorical dandruff. Yet in his best work, most notably Angels and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, the paradoxical notion of forgiveness in the face of the day-to-day apocalypse sits at the center of Johnson’s scarred imaginative