“My ear for the diction and rhythms of poetry was trained by — in chronological order — Dr. Seuss, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, the guitar solos of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, and T.S. Eliot,” he said. “Other influences come and go, but those I admire the most and those I admired the earliest (I still admire them) have something to say in every line I write.”
“Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son is his fifth book of fiction, the previous four being novels with similar preoccupations: loveless promiscuity, the abuse of narcotics and alcohol, the debilitating effects of parental neglect and the sometimes violent paradoxes inherent in the Christian notions of salvation and self-sacrifice. His prose, especially in this book and in the novels Angels and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, consistently generates imagery of ferocious intensity, much of it shaded with a menacing, even deranged sense of humor. No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked ‘insensitivity’ in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction.
In nearly every respect Jesus’ Son can be more accurately described as a novel than as a collection of stories. The same unnamed young drifter narrates each of the book’s 11 chapterlike sections, only six or seven of which can stand as discrete, coherent short stories; each is most fully understood in the context of earlier or subsequent sections. The narrator also makes distinctly novelistic progress as he staggers from habit to addiction—passively participating along the way in abortions and car crashes, drug deals and murder—and then toward the first stages of a highly tentative recovery.
In the book’s Cubist chronology, a man named Jack Hotel dies of a heroin overdose at the end of the third section, while the fourth finds him smoking hashish as he attempts to help a gunshot victim. The second section, entitled Two Men,’ involves the narrator’s attempts to ‘ditch’ a sociopathic football player; the eighth section begins, ‘But I never finished telling you about the two men. I never even started describing the second one.’
The narrator’s inability to construct a ‘well-made’ story, or even to keep the facts of his life straight, expressively parallels the rest of his dysfunctional behavior. In this and in other aspects he is a younger version of Samuel Beckett’s monologuists, who continually fail to execute their often-restated narrative plans, and who tend to feel profoundly ambivalent about the women in their lives, particularly their mothers. There are further similarities, in the focus on physical maladies and failure shared by characters in Mr. Johnson’s and Beckett’s works and in the trapdoor cadences and self-deprecating humor of their sentences. After lying to impress a girlfriend, Mr. Johnson’s narrator admits, ‘Nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.’ In his dependence on heroin and illegal sources of income, he also is cousin to Bobby, the hapless but sympathetic young burglar in David Mamet’s American Buffalo. In the end he realizes, as Bobby does, that he’s probably better off spending some time in a hospital.
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