Rating: 
Summary: Good stories - a great movie too.
Review: I love the movie that was based on these stories. The book works well as a film because the writing style is very visual. The main character is based on the life of the author himself, who fell pretty far before he got it together enough to write about it. I'd read the book again, and rent the movie too.
Rating:
Summary: a glimpse of god
Review: Denis Johnson drags the reader through a series of short stories that just barely manage to avoid becoming a novella. There is no climax, resolution, or denoument, and that's the point. There are only the stories, moments in the lives of the beautiful and scarred characters Johnson makes us intimate with. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: a glimpse of god
Review: Denis Johnson drags the reader through a series of short stories which only sort of meld together into a novella. But that's the point. It isn't a novella. There isn't a climax, resolution, and denoument. There are only the stories, moments, events loosely tied together by the beautiful and scarred characters Johnson creates for us. Read it.
Rating:
Summary: Poetic, depraved, utterly amazing...
Review: Denis Johnson has fast become one of my absolute favorite writers. His rhythmic, hauntingly eloquent, and at times completely simple style is unforgettable and undenyable. Jesus' Son just reinforces it. While, yes, it is at times incredibly depressing, through and through, depressing or not, this book is incredible. It shows Johnson's absolute mastery of the language, and his complete skill as a writer. No matter what pointless, stupid, horrific, and depraved acts the narrator performs, we still love him, we still root for him and his hopelessness. Not a hero, not an antihero, the narrator has little or no admirable qualities, but his way of looking at the world enthralls the reader. I don't know how many times while reading this book I said "Why the hell didn't I think to write that?"
Rating:
Summary: an american masterpiece
Review: It's what Huck Finn's life would have been like if he'd been in his early 20's in the 1970's. A really beautiful series of dark and shimmering stories that move you and amuse you. The characters are great. It almost takes as long to read as it takes to watch the film, but one should do both since each is, in its own way, a treasure.
Rating:
Summary: I knew every rain drop by it's name
Review: I read this book of short stories because I am a huge Chuck Palahniuk fan, and I read somewhere that this was one of Chuck's fav's. It is a bunch of short stories about pain, suffering, and recovery. The main character ....is a heroin addict just trying to be, and is at times quite poetic. The stories range from a car crash, to shooting dope in hotel rooms, to falling for another addict, to an unforgetable emergency room chapter, to rehab centers. Subjects range from the beauty of life itself to abortion. It is a short book only takes a few hours to read, but it is a treat, it is something different and unpredictable. I suggest that you read the book and then check out the movie, staring Billy Cruddup, the dude that was in Almost Famous. All in all, great original stories that in the end will leave you feeling good, and most of all alive.
Rating:
Summary: The continuing adventures of the heroin chic...
Review: I can't say I understood them all--and I certainly couldn't identify with the lifestyle of the main character--but I was riveted to his meandering, plotless adventures. It gives insight into a world completely foreign to me, but somehow manages to make it semi-appealing, much as Trainspotting (an altogether completely different work) did, just because they seem to be having so much fun. The centerpiece is "Emergency," an over-the-top (almost farcical) piece about working in the ER.
Rating:
Summary: A minor classic
Review: I was originally attracted to this short-story collection because Denis Johnson is one of the fairly small number of current American writers to have multiple works deemed "canonical" by Harold Bloom in his "The Western Conon." Three of Johnson's make Bloom's list (this one, "Angels" and "Fiskadoro.") While I'm not much of an admirer of Bloom's critical methadology (which seems to be a sort of warmed-over Freudianism), and I'm not sure that the idea of a "Western Canon" makes much sense anymore, if it ever did, his critical acumen in identifying enriching and important works is superb, and he is right on with Denis Johnson. "Jesus' Son" is a series of short pieces, hardly even short stories, episodes in the life of a twenty-something dealing with heroin addiction, violence, and broken relationships. It's an understatement to call this a dark vision of America. Johnson's vision calls to mind Celine, Camus, Burroughs, maybe Kerouac as his literary predecessors. There are gems of description and dialogue on almost every page. The nameless protagonist goes from a near-fatal car crash, to addition, to a near-fatal OD, to some kind of tenative truce with the fates: "All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us." I have just seen the movie of the same name based on this, and it too is excellent, but would recommend that the book be read first. This is easily the strongest collection of short fiction I've read in a long time, and I think, with Harold Bloom, that it will some day be deemed "canonical."
Rating: 
Summary: Real stories from a gifted author
Review: A lot of us have lived lives like many of the characters in Denis Johnson's brilliant collection of stories in Jesus' Son. For those of us that have, and that were able to survive them to grow into more sensible beings, these stories are reminders of how a lot of humanity struggles to cope, to live, to just make it through another day. Denis Johnson has his finger on the pulse of that other world that many people will only read about, and he offers them the stories with stinging clarity and an outstanding literary style.
Rating:
Summary: Coffeehouse cool.
Review: The movie, JESUS' SON, haunted me. The force of Denis Johnson's well-crafted prose will leave you "crushed breathless." He took the title of this collection of eleven, interlinked short stories from a Lou Reed song about heroin, and each story involves drug or alcohol abuse. Many of these stories take place "under Midwestern clouds" (p. 5) in America's heartland, Iowa and Missouri, at county fairs and drive-in movies. Disturbing.As a whole, JESUS' SON progresses from addiction to recovery and growth, from death to life, beginning with a fatal car crash (described in graphic detail), and ending here in "the desert clarity" (p. 158) of Phoenix where, like the narrator, "tiny blossoms grow out of cactus thorns" (p. 141). Along the way, we follow the narrator as he wanders outside his own mind, and into the thoughts and dreams of others. The narrator hears cotton balls crying in pain in an emergency room, and seeds moaning in a garden (p. 18). Johnson's writing will often leave you you wondering, "what does this mean?" The narrator speaks from experience. It's easy to imagine his fingers, "all yellow from smoking." Johnson writes with a poet's eye for detail. Addiction is not entertaining, and this book may not appeal to everyone. I couldn't put it down. G. Merritt
|
