Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson’s short story collection, Jesus’ Son, got on my radar during The Morning News’ Tournament of Books. Several judges preferred it to Johnson’s more recent book, Tree of Smoke. I thought ToS was quite good, so I was intrigued to see what Jesus’ Son would yield.
I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a–wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head–tunnel) actually lived.
This passage, about riding the train in the city, described how I felt as I read the linked stories–along for a whiplash ride. The unnamed main character is addicted to heroin and alcohol, and stumbles through bars, rehab, relationships, jobs and crime. The writing is beautiful, while also conveying both the horror and kaleidoscopic nature of addiction. The stories and book are brief, but powerful. If you like the short story form, these charted new territory when they were collected in 1992, and still resonate today.