Jesus' Son
Stories
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
American master Denis Johnson's nationally bestselling collection of blistering and indelible tales about America's outcasts and wanderers.
Denis Johnson's now classic story collection Jesus' Son chronicles a wild netherworld of addicts and lost souls, a violent and disordered landscape that encompasses every extreme of American culture. These are stories of transcendence and spiraling grief, of hallucinations and glories, of getting lost and found and lost again. The insights and careening energy in Jesus' Son have earned the book a place of its own among the classics of twentieth-century American literature. It was adapted into a critically-praised film in 1999.
PUBLISHERS 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 ( Angels ; Resuscitation of a Hanged Man ) 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.
