Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson | Picador Modern Classics #3 | Perfect for Book Clubs & Literary Fiction Lovers

About a month ago I read a piece in "The New York Times" by Matt Bell that lauded JESUS' SON as a "looming influence" on him as a writer. In the article, Bell tells of how another book had had a similar looming influence on Denis Johnson, the author of JESUS' SON -- namely, "Fat City" by Leonard Gardner. That snagged my attention, because when I read "Fat City" a few years ago I was wowed by it and I continue to think of it as one of the most underappreciated novels in American literature. (New York Review Books recently published a new edition of "Fat City", which should help bring it a wider readership.) The roundabout association of "Fat City" with JESUS' SON was enough for me to read the latter. And I am very glad I did. It may not be quite as starkly real as "Fat City", but it is among the most powerful and original books of (relatively) contemporary American literature that I have read. ("Relatively" because it was published twenty-three years ago.)The title is taken from the Lou Reed song, "Heroin": "When I'm rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus' Son * * *." All eleven stories of JESUS' SON are marinated to some extent in alcohol or drugs, including heroin. More broadly, they all feature the by-passed of America, the people who have fled from mainstream society or been shunned or shunted aside by it, the people neither the Democrats nor the Republicans try to reach because they simply don't matter (nor do they vote). Theirs is a mixed-up, shook-up world, and it is brilliantly rendered by Johnson. The stories struck me as somewhat like the prose equivalents of the poems of Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du mal".The stories, or their plots, are rather mundane, though they can be weird as an Hieronymus Bosch hell. For example, in "Emergency" the first-person narrator (all eleven are told in the first person) goes off driving on his break between shifts with his emergency room co-worker Georgie, who runs over a rabbit; Georgie backs up and hops out with the idea of skinning and dressing the rabbit for food with the hunting knife that he had removed from the head of an ER patient a few hours earlier, but then discovers that the rabbit was pregnant, so he brings back to the truck "slimy miniature bunnies", exclaiming "with a look of glory on his face", "We killed the mother and saved the children." (At the end of the story, Georgie and the narrator pick up a hitchhiker who is AWOL and fleeing to Canada; he asks Georgie what he does for a job; Georgie says, "I save lives.")Others have written about ennui and Jesus' Son, but few if any have told the story with such literary chops. Here are three excerpts:* "That night I sat in a booth across from Kid Williams, a former boxer. * * * He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to us who'd wasted only a few years. With Kid Williams sitting across from you it was nothing to contemplate going on like this for another month or two."* "The day was sunny, unusual for the Northwest Coast. I'm sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green--in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorus--islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God * * *."* "I pushed through the door into Kelly's. Inside they sat with their fat hands around their beers while the jukebox sang softly to itself. You'd think they'd found out how, by sitting still and holding their necks just so, to look down into lost worlds."