Sunday With Books: Jesus' Son
Considering Denis Johnson has gone on record as admitting he spent the better half of his youth in a perennial drug haze, I went into reading Jesus’ Son assuming the narrator would be Johnson himself.
I was wrong.
His name is “Fuckhead.”
The fact that the book borrows its title from a Velvet Underground lyric seemed to suggest some personal element, too, but the first few pages make it pretty clear “Fuckhead” is pure fiction. Our protagonist wakes up in the back of a stranger’s Volkswagen, and is immediately overwhelmed by a hashish-fueled premonition that he and the other passengers are about to get in a wreck, which is exactly what happens.
“The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts. My thoughts zoomed pitifully…I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop for me before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we’d get in an accident in the storm.”
The rest of the book isn’t any less bleak or cryptic, but it does ultimately have a redemptive arc; the whole thing reads like a conflation of William Burroughs’ Junkie and Henry Miller’s Black Spring, with a sleek, concise prose that harkens back to another past master, Johnson’s former teacher at the legendary Iowa Writers Workshop, an oft-referenced personal favorite of mine: Raymond Carver.
Given the borderline-traumatic nature of nearly every single story in this book, I can’t really leave a sample here on the site. But, if you’re interested, and are willing to look past that *questionable* cover art, click the link below for a taste. —Jackson Todd
Read ‘Work’ from Jesus’ Son here.
[above photo: Denis Johnson, 1976, by R.N. Johnson]
