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    Jesus' Son: Stories
    Jesus' Son: Stories
    Jesus' Son: Stories
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Jesus' Son: Stories

    By Denis Johnson

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9781466806887
    Author

    Denis Johnson

    Denis Johnson is the author of several novels, including Already Dead (published by Picador), Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, Angels and The Name of the World, as well as a short story writer and poet. He lives in northern Idaho.

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    Reviews for Jesus' Son

    4/5

    860 ratings47 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a beautifully written and creatively crafted book. The prose is hallucinatory and the stories are both depressing and dementedly funny. It offers a unique perspective on life and leaves a lasting impact on readers. Overall, it is a faultless and enlightening read that evokes both laughter and tears.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Raw poetry set into stories of all sorts of people down on their luck, usually with no one to blame but themselves.
    • 5/5
      My first experience with Denis Johnson's work. I really enjoyed the stories and the writing. So much poetry in these bleak stories. Without the beautiful writing, the characters and situations likely wouldn't have held my interest very long. I can't wait to read more of Johnson's work.
    • 4/5
      Another short story collection with a ton of hoopla about it. Pretty good stories of deadbeats and their lives and dope and booze, which apparently the author knows from his own life. You can pick this slim volume up and put it down and read it in bits. I had no idea that he influenced so many writers. He reminds me a bit of my misspent youth and the fiction of James Purdy.
    • 3/5
      I will say this about this, and you won't all like it: pick a story and read it. Pick another story now, and read that too. Put it down. You have now read Jesus' Son, and you will think "these stories are striking and wonderful." But read all the stories in their proper order, and you might think (at least I did), "these stories are all the same. The first two were wonderful, but after them I felt I was dealing with a one trick pony, and one trick ponies are no kind of pony to be." If you understand what I am saying call me. My number is 610 608 8##3.
    • 2/5
      Y'know, shit. This book? The film followed it amazingly well. I think the two need to exist together, one a colour picture of the other.It's like reading a dream that is typed as seen, and you've been there and you haven't. You know every asshole and jerk described in the book and you remember the same hopes.
    • 4/5
      A hard read. This book reads like John Cheever on Heroin. The title, taken from Lou Reed's "Heroin", is unassuming. What lies beneath the cover of this small book are some of the most memorable character, and haunting situation in contemporary literature. The book takes from Joyce the "epiphany" laced short story form, adds junk. The last story ties this together in a neat package, and that package weakens the over effect of the book. But overall this book is a must read, and it will be something that you will go back to again and again for more.
    • 4/5
      Reading these stories, it felt like every excess word was stripped away. Each story was like a pristine crystal. This is real writing. Denis Johnson is a major talent. This ranks up there with the works of Chekhov (seriously), and Hemingway. Sometimes it reminded me of Brautigan (when at his best). This may be Johnson's masterpiece. Spare, beautiful, haunting. I want to hug the guy for writing something this beautiful.
    • 4/5
      Gritty, gritty, gritty, gritty, gritty.
    • 5/5
      An amazing work by one of my favorite authors. I lent this book to a patient I had and he returned with a small note written on the inside, which I think sums up the work very well; "So much chaos brought to heel."
    • 5/5
      Absolutely the best book you'll ever read about drugs, torture, Amish voyeurism, etc. And it's not very long, so no excuses.
    • 3/5
      Somewhere on the book jacket or in a review, I read that Johnson's stories offered a "surreal perspective" on American society. It doesn't seem surreal to me at all, just a take on our society from a viewpoint most mainstream folks rarely, if ever, encounter. These stories are weirdly captivating and quite well written.
    • 4/5
      I'm giving this book four stars if only because I've been giving out five stars too willy-nilly and it's gotta stop. Am I going to go back and reevaluate books I've already rated five stars? No, probably not. Because I AM LAZY.

      That being said this book is great and I am a fool for not having read this sooner. Especially because I read Tree of Smoke and Train Dreams first. This book presents a world that I don't want to be a part of, yet I can't help but get the feeling that it is already all around us. It's scary, but the writing is beautiful.

      You should read this book sooner rather than later, then you won’t feel foolish like I do.
    • 3/5
      Despite myself I actually kind of got into this by the end. The stories are explicitly centered on one character, which gets around the problem of Lange's 'Dead Boys,' that all the protagonists are the same but meant to be different. It also means that the 'stories' that lack a plot, point, theme, structure and any interest whatsoever (and that's most of them, let's be honest) can be treated more like you treat the chapters in a novel which don't necessarily develop, but do contribute something else to the book. The great stories - Car Crash, Emergency, and Beverly Home - stand out all the more because the rest of them are so dull and pointless. In short, what looks to begin with like another glorification/damnation of junkie living turns out to be an admission that junkie life is deathly boring compared to what should be the dullness and cliched rubbish of 'rehabilitation,' 'detox' and narcotics anonymous.
      The catch is that, as in every junkie book I've ever read and will ever read, the narrator or, at the very least, the protagonist, is an emotional idiot. Anything which isn't violently painful or pointless is gloriously salvific and splendiferous. The options in this world are suffering, or Disneyfied technicolor. Perhaps that's what addiction does to you. But a large part of the dullness of that life is the black and white nature of it. And it doesn't make for the best book.
    • 5/5
      Vignettes of a hollow man with a hollow vein in an even more hollow Midwestern landscape puking up the ashes of the American Dream alongside a cadre of irredeemable characters. All at once, surprisingly, a hilarious and devastating book with characters you pity ad struggle to perceive as human, even though you know they exist, somewhere. Half dream, half wreck, despite the prose which is always beautiful and always present. Some of the best American short fiction since O'Connor and Hemingway.
    • 5/5
      No one else does it like this.
    • 5/5
      Denis Johnson is an amazing writer. Amazing. The final story in this collection completely blew me away. Truthfully, I wish I had been reading a novel rather than short stories which is why initially I was disappointed. Every time I would get into a story it would end. Regardless, I recommend this whole-heartedly if only for the final story.
    • 3/5
      Literary and concise, this brief volume reminds me of a strobe light set on low. Each bright flash reveals an image of the whole, but they are such that you can almost forget how they all fit together. The writing is high quality, but I'm not sure if I really enjoyed it. Probably too smart for the likes of me.
    • 3/5
      I was expecting to like these stories more than I did. While I appreciate the writing style, the refusal to conform to normal prose standards, and the realism of a life of addiction, I felt cut off from the characters. Good writing to be sure, but not my cup of tea.
    • 5/5
      An excellent collection of short stories from start to end. Johnson's is an unique talent looking at the world from an outsiders point of view. Thematically the books revolves around the same set of personalities, enviroments and circumstances. If there is something to quibble about here that may it but I would argue that even though this is a short story collection that the stories are all meant to be interconnected and these are important characteristics of Johnson's book. The solipsistic protagonist is almost always a drug addicted innocent and more often than not a hospital is involved. Commenting on life or the world he accepts almost everything that happens to him or to others with his wide open/eyed innocence. There is a kind of cinematic quality evident throughout--often hilarious but almost always compelling life unfolds before the eyes of a somewhat deranged and hapless drug addict/alcoholic. --it is one of the best short story collections I've ever read and is highly recommended. In any event opening up with an epigram from the Velvet Underground's 'Heroin'--'when I'm rushing on my run and I feel just like jesus' son' I was immediately hooked. I knew I was going to love this book almost immediately and I would recommend it highly.
    • 5/5
      More than a decade after their publication, these interconnected tales – which come partly from Johnson’s experiences as a drug-addicted twenty-something in Iowa during the 70s, and partly from his wicked imagination – still have the power to amaze. With no likeable hero, no apparent plot, and little regard for conventional storytelling methods, they have no business being so good; and yet, through brutal honesty, deep complexity, the darkest of dark humor and some beautiful, odd, utterly perfect language, they elevate to something higher than most conventional story collections – which is to say, they manage to be entertaining and artistically compelling at the same time.

      The same can be said for Johnson’s narrator, a young drifter with such a knack for conjuring up disaster he’s known only by the nickname “Fuckhead.â€? In “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,â€? the collection’s opening piece, we find him strung-out on an impressive list of substances as he stands at the side of the road in a rainstorm, trying to hitch a ride from a family in a Volkswagen. He gives no indication where he comes from or where he’s trying to get to, and what comes next – an accident, after which he does everything possible to avoid the responsibility of helping the victims – sets one of the driving ideas of the book into motion; in the course of the next ten episodes we will follow Fuckhead as he dodges the burdens and, ultimately, comes to understand the rewards of responsibility through a series of experiences that are usually tragic and almost always beyond bizarre.

      Consider a few more examples: In “Work,â€? Fuckhead and Wayne, a ruined alcoholic, break into an abandoned house to steal copper wire from the walls and find a deep sense of accomplishment in having completed the job. In “Emergency,â€? he, Georgie – a delusional, pill-popping orderly – and the rest of a dysfunctional Catholic hospital staff try to decide how to handle a patient with a knife sticking into his brain. In “Dundun,â€? Fuckhead arrives at a farmhouse where he hopes to find pharmaceutical opium, but instead finds that he’s the only one sober enough to drive a wounded man to the hospital (the others tried, but of course crashed into a barn before they ever got started.) And in “Dirty Wedding,â€? he accompanies his pregnant girlfriend to Chicago for an abortion and ends up contemplating life in the womb while riding the el train with a bare-chested man he believes might be Christ.

      Clearly, Johnson’s vision of the world is wholly his own.

      As is his style, which can seem minimalist at times, but never to the point that it becomes too spare. Just as his substance-abusing and substantially confusing narrator’s train of thought shifts without warning – looping back on itself, lurching forward, then looping back on itself again (sometimes in the same paragraph!) – Johnson’s prose shifts unexpectedly into a lofty poetic style that really works the tongue when he’s pushing at an important image or idea – at one point, he describes the vision of a hailstorm as “miraculous balls of hail popping in green translucence in the yard.â€? In many ways, in fact, the stories are poems, overflowing with fresh metaphors for and weighty statements about women, love, birth, memory, friendship, survival, addiction, belonging and death – or, to put it another way, almost everything worth reading about.

      If you haven’t heard of Jesus’ Son – and a lot of people who do something other than write words for a living still haven’t – that’s too bad. This is the kind of book you tell your friends about, but refuse to let them borrow, lest they forget to return it. Its images and characters won’t come loose from your brain for a long time after you’ve finished it, and you’ll find yourself craving its strangeness and grim beauty again and again. Find a copy. Read it to worn out pieces. You won’t be sorry.
    • 5/5
      Faultless. Really. I cried and laughed in equal measure, and the world looked a little different when I had finished reading this book.
    • 3/5
      Didn’t love. There are bits and pieces of good inventive writing but in general it was a set of messy stories, much like the protagonist who seemed like a passive, falling-apart, hopeless person. In the last couple stories things looked like they might have been looking up, a little.
    • 5/5
      I felt a true kinship with Denis Johnson while reading this book. I felt inspired to write time and again reading these stories. I savoured them over a long stretch, not wanting the experience to be over. Johnson's prose rings with the realism of Raymond Carver, and he's a better poet.

      You just...have to read this book. There's no one quote that will do it justice.
    • 5/5
      as dark and powerful as everyone says.
    • 5/5
      HOLY HELL!
      Jesus' Son took me for a much needed loop. The stories in here are all threaded together by a common narrator, set in different parts of the US, mostly midwest and Pacific Northwest. It wasn't so much the content but Johnson's controlled style and when he lets a bit of madness and beauty unfold that made this an outstanding collection to read. Reminded me of a tempered Hubert Selby Jr. in terms of content with more concentrated weirdness.
    • 5/5
      Hallucinatory prose from cover to cover. Beautiful, depressing, and dementedly funny.

      Denis Johnson had a rare gift for lateral creativity. Every line in this book comes as a complete surprise. He obviously lived the life he wrote about—although probably a less horrible version of it.
    • 5/5
      Very interesting stories. Not a work I would normally read but this was recommended by another author that I have enjoyed reading so I gave it a read. Very enlightening...SLT
    • 5/5
      [2006 thought]
      This is the book that gave me the edge to write prose. I read it three years ago and after reading it, I thought maybe it was time to work on prose rather than poetry.

      [2012 review]
      The collection of stories follows a character whose name is never mentioned, though the moniker fuckhead follows him like a proverbial rain cloud. A junky, Fuckhead, walks through life having several misadventures, none without reason. He is lucky, but he's a failure. He tries, but rarely succeeds at anything. His friends are there one moment, and buried the next.

      There is no chronological order to the stories found within the covers of this book, but, nevertheless, the reader leaves with something he didn't have before - an experience only someone strung out on heroin could have felt. Because that's what Denis Johnson presents to us with his collection - literary heroin. And we'll keep going back for more.
    • 4/5
      This book's collection of stories rest awkward and jagged in your hands, threatening to break the skin if held too carelessly.
    • 5/5
      The man we know only as Fuckhead is a total mess. As the main character in the interconnected short stories comprising Denis Johnson’s enthralling Jesus’ Son, he has little to recommend for himself, including being an inveterate liar and thief who is addicted to both drugs and alcohol, as well as a Peeping Tom and even a bunny killer. What may be even worse, though, is that he is a consistently unreliable narrator whose fractured, drug-addled memories give the entire volume a frenetic and disjointed presentation style. In tale after tale, the reader is introduced to the seedier side of life as Fuckhead and his reprobate associates move from run-down bars to squalid hotels to dead-end jobs when they are not in rehab facilities in an often-cynical attempt to clean up their lives. In short, this is a book that, collectively, paints a very grim picture of society’s underbelly with virtually no hope or salvation in sight.

      So, why did I love reading this brief book so much? There are many reasons, really, but chief among them would have to be the author’s brutally direct but incredibly electric writing. In Fuckhead, Johnson perfectly captures the rhythms and mindset of an intelligent, but highly troubled young man who cannot manage to pull himself out the self-inflicted hole he’s put himself in and, for the most part, does not seem to care to try. Among the best of the stories, most of which were published independently in prestigious literary magazines before being collected into a single volume, were ‘Two Men, ‘Work’, ‘Emergency,' ‘The Other Man’, and ‘Beverly Home’. Although each of these works involve different events—and is set in various locales, from somewhere in the Midwest to Seattle to Phoenix, underscoring the shiftlessness of Fuckhead’s existence—by the end they combine into a fully realized narrative. There is nothing pretty or redemptive to be found in Jesus’ Son, but it is riveting nonetheless and an absolute classic.

    Book preview

    Jesus' Son - Denis Johnson

    Car Crash While Hitchhiking

    A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping … A Cherokee filled with bourbon … A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student …

    And a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri …

    … I rose up sopping wet from sleeping under the pouring rain, and something less than conscious, thanks to the first three of the people I’ve already named—the salesman and the Indian and the student—all of whom had given me drugs. At the head of the entrance ramp I waited without hope of a ride. What was the point, even, of rolling up my sleeping bag when I was too wet to be let into anybody’s car? I draped it around me like a cape. The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts. My thoughts zoomed pitifully. The travelling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.

    I didn’t care. They said they’d take me all the way.

    The man and the wife put the little girl up front with them and left the baby in back with me and my dripping bedroll. I’m not taking you anywhere very fast, the man said. I’ve got my wife and babies here, that’s why.

    You are the ones, I thought. And I piled my sleeping bag against the left-hand door and slept across it, not caring whether I lived or died. The baby slept free on the seat beside me. He was about nine months old.

    … But before any of this, that afternoon, the salesman and I had swept down into Kansas City in his luxury car. We’d developed a dangerous cynical camaraderie beginning in Texas, where he’d taken me on. We ate up his bottle of amphetamines, and every so often we pulled off the Interstate and bought another pint of Canadian Club and a sack of ice. His car had cylindrical glass holders attached to either door and a white, leathery interior. He said he’d take me home to stay overnight with his family, but first he wanted to stop and see a woman he knew.

    Under Midwestern clouds like great grey brains we left the superhighway with a drifting sensation and entered Kansas City’s rush hour with a sensation of running aground. As soon as we slowed down, all the magic of travelling together burned away. He went on and on about his girlfriend. I like this girl, I think I love this girl—but I’ve got two kids and a wife, and there’s certain obligations there. And on top of everything else, I love my wife. I’m gifted with love. I love my kids. I love all my relatives. As he kept on, I felt jilted and sad: I have a boat, a little sixteen-footer. I have two cars. There’s room in the back yard for a swimming pool. He found his girlfriend at work. She ran a furniture store, and I lost him there.

    The clouds stayed the same until night. Then, in the dark, I didn’t see the storm gathering. The driver of the Volkswagen, a college man, the one who stoked my head with all the hashish, let me out beyond the city limits just as it began to rain. Never mind the speed I’d been taking, I was too overcome to stand up. I lay out in the grass off the exit ramp and woke in the middle of a puddle that had filled up around me.

    And later, as I’ve said, I slept in the back seat while the Oldsmobile—the family from Marshalltown—splashed along through the rain. And yet I dreamed I was looking right through my eyelids, and my pulse marked off the seconds of time. The Interstate through western Missouri was, in that era, nothing more than a two-way road, most of it. When a semi truck came toward us and passed going the other way, we were lost in a blinding spray and a warfare of noises such as you get being towed through an automatic car wash. The wipers stood up and lay down across the windshield without much effect. I was exhausted, and after an hour I slept more deeply.

    I’d known all along exactly what was going to happen. But the man and his wife woke me up later, denying it viciously.

    "Oh—no!"

    NO!

    I was thrown against the back of their seat so hard that it broke. I commenced bouncing back and forth. A liquid which I knew right away was human blood flew around the car and rained down on my head. When it was over I was in the back seat again, just as I had been. I rose up and looked around. Our headlights had gone out. The radiator was hissing steadily. Beyond that, I didn’t hear a thing. As far as I could tell, I was the only one conscious. As my eyes adjusted I saw that the baby was lying on its back beside me as if nothing had happened. Its eyes were open and it was feeling its cheeks with its little hands.

    In a minute the driver, who’d been slumped over the wheel, sat up and peered at us. His face was smashed and dark with blood. It made my teeth hurt to look at him—but when he spoke, it didn’t sound as if any of his teeth were broken.

    What happened?

    We had a wreck, he said.

    The baby’s okay, I said, although I had no idea how the baby was.

    He turned to his wife.

    Janice, he said. Janice, Janice!

    Is she okay?

    She’s dead! he said, shaking her angrily.

    No, she’s not. I was ready to deny everything myself now.

    Their little girl was alive, but knocked out. She whimpered in her sleep. But the man went on shaking his wife.

    Janice! he hollered.

    His wife moaned.

    She’s not dead, I said, clambering from the car and running away.

    She won’t wake up, I heard him say.

    I was standing out here in the night, with the baby, for some reason, in my arms. It must have still been raining, but I remember nothing about the weather. We’d collided with another car on what I now perceived was a two-lane bridge. The water beneath us was invisible in the dark.

    Moving toward the other car I began to hear rasping, metallic snores. Somebody was flung halfway out the passenger door, which was open, in the posture of one hanging from a trapeze by his ankles. The car had been broadsided, smashed so flat that no room was left inside it even for this person’s legs, to say nothing of a driver or any other passengers. I just walked right on past.

    Headlights were coming from far off. I made for the head of the bridge, waving them to a stop with one arm and clutching the baby to my shoulder with the other.

    It was a big semi, grinding its gears as it decelerated. The driver rolled down his window and I shouted up at him, "There’s a wreck. Go for

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