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    Jesus' Son: Stories
    Jesus' Son: Stories
    Jesus' Son: Stories
    Audiobook2 hours

    Jesus' Son: Stories

    Written by Denis Johnson

    Narrated by Will Patton

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    American master Denis Johnson's nationally bestselling collection of blistering and indelible tales about America's outcasts and wanderers.

    Denis Johnson's now classic story collection Jesus' Son chronicles a wild netherworld of addicts and lost souls, a violent and disordered landscape that encompasses every extreme of American culture. These are stories of transcendence and spiraling grief, of hallucinations and glories, of getting lost and found and lost again. The insights and careening energy in Jesus' Son have earned the book a place of its own among the classics of twentieth-century American literature. It was adapted into a critically-praised film in 1999.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9781427205728
    Author

    Denis Johnson

    Denis Johnson is the author of The Name of the World, Already Dead, Jesus' Son, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, and Angels. His poetry has been collected in the volume The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.

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    Reviews for Jesus' Son

    4/5

    822 ratings47 reviews

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    • 5/5
      One of those books that makes me want to give up writing because I'll never write anything that good.
    • 5/5
      An American classic. Midwest apathetic escapism deftly described by an amazing wordsmith, talented beyond his years.
    • 5/5
      Pure, unadulterated art. Beauty: powerful and viscous, yet fine as a comb and featherlight. Will Patton speaks with both comprehension and respect. Short, yet commanding.
      A sensuous feast for the senses. I recommend it to all. RIP Denis Johnson—you genius.
    • 4/5
      Another short story collection with a ton of hoopla about it. Pretty good stories of deadbeats and their lives and dope and booze, which apparently the author knows from his own life. You can pick this slim volume up and put it down and read it in bits. I had no idea that he influenced so many writers. He reminds me a bit of my misspent youth and the fiction of James Purdy.
    • 4/5
      An interesting mix of stories about a junkie/drunk. While the subject matter is not always pleasant, I found the writing style to be good.
    • 5/5
      More than a decade after their publication, these interconnected tales – which come partly from Johnson’s experiences as a drug-addicted twenty-something in Iowa during the 70s, and partly from his wicked imagination – still have the power to amaze. With no likeable hero, no apparent plot, and little regard for conventional storytelling methods, they have no business being so good; and yet, through brutal honesty, deep complexity, the darkest of dark humor and some beautiful, odd, utterly perfect language, they elevate to something higher than most conventional story collections – which is to say, they manage to be entertaining and artistically compelling at the same time. The same can be said for Johnson’s narrator, a young drifter with such a knack for conjuring up disaster he’s known only by the nickname “Fuckhead.â€? In “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,â€? the collection’s opening piece, we find him strung-out on an impressive list of substances as he stands at the side of the road in a rainstorm, trying to hitch a ride from a family in a Volkswagen. He gives no indication where he comes from or where he’s trying to get to, and what comes next – an accident, after which he does everything possible to avoid the responsibility of helping the victims – sets one of the driving ideas of the book into motion; in the course of the next ten episodes we will follow Fuckhead as he dodges the burdens and, ultimately, comes to understand the rewards of responsibility through a series of experiences that are usually tragic and almost always beyond bizarre. Consider a few more examples: In “Work,â€? Fuckhead and Wayne, a ruined alcoholic, break into an abandoned house to steal copper wire from the walls and find a deep sense of accomplishment in having completed the job. In “Emergency,â€? he, Georgie – a delusional, pill-popping orderly – and the rest of a dysfunctional Catholic hospital staff try to decide how to handle a patient with a knife sticking into his brain. In “Dundun,â€? Fuckhead arrives at a farmhouse where he hopes to find pharmaceutical opium, but instead finds that he’s the only one sober enough to drive a wounded man to the hospital (the others tried, but of course crashed into a barn before they ever got started.) And in “Dirty Wedding,â€? he accompanies his pregnant girlfriend to Chicago for an abortion and ends up contemplating life in the womb while riding the el train with a bare-chested man he believes might be Christ. Clearly, Johnson’s vision of the world is wholly his own. As is his style, which can seem minimalist at times, but never to the point that it becomes too spare. Just as his substance-abusing and substantially confusing narrator’s train of thought shifts without warning – looping back on itself, lurching forward, then looping back on itself again (sometimes in the same paragraph!) – Johnson’s prose shifts unexpectedly into a lofty poetic style that really works the tongue when he’s pushing at an important image or idea – at one point, he describes the vision of a hailstorm as “miraculous balls of hail popping in green translucence in the yard.â€? In many ways, in fact, the stories are poems, overflowing with fresh metaphors for and weighty statements about women, love, birth, memory, friendship, survival, addiction, belonging and death – or, to put it another way, almost everything worth reading about. If you haven’t heard of Jesus’ Son – and a lot of people who do something other than write words for a living still haven’t – that’s too bad. This is the kind of book you tell your friends about, but refuse to let them borrow, lest they forget to return it. Its images and characters won’t come loose from your brain for a long time after you’ve finished it, and you’ll find yourself craving its strangeness and grim beauty again and again. Find a copy. Read it to worn out pieces. You won’t be sorry.
    • 5/5
      Phantastic, poetic, sad. Like a slightly vague dream , Johnson's writing hits a nerve, you probably never knew you had. I enjoyed it tremendously.
    • 3/5
      Didn’t love. There are bits and pieces of good inventive writing but in general it was a set of messy stories, much like the protagonist who seemed like a passive, falling-apart, hopeless person. In the last couple stories things looked like they might have been looking up, a little.
    • 5/5
      [2006 thought]
      This is the book that gave me the edge to write prose. I read it three years ago and after reading it, I thought maybe it was time to work on prose rather than poetry.

      [2012 review]
      The collection of stories follows a character whose name is never mentioned, though the moniker fuckhead follows him like a proverbial rain cloud. A junky, Fuckhead, walks through life having several misadventures, none without reason. He is lucky, but he's a failure. He tries, but rarely succeeds at anything. His friends are there one moment, and buried the next.

      There is no chronological order to the stories found within the covers of this book, but, nevertheless, the reader leaves with something he didn't have before - an experience only someone strung out on heroin could have felt. Because that's what Denis Johnson presents to us with his collection - literary heroin. And we'll keep going back for more.
    • 5/5
      The man we know only as Fuckhead is a total mess. As the main character in the interconnected short stories comprising Denis Johnson’s enthralling Jesus’ Son, he has little to recommend for himself, including being an inveterate liar and thief who is addicted to both drugs and alcohol, as well as a Peeping Tom and even a bunny killer. What may be even worse, though, is that he is a consistently unreliable narrator whose fractured, drug-addled memories give the entire volume a frenetic and disjointed presentation style. In tale after tale, the reader is introduced to the seedier side of life as Fuckhead and his reprobate associates move from run-down bars to squalid hotels to dead-end jobs when they are not in rehab facilities in an often-cynical attempt to clean up their lives. In short, this is a book that, collectively, paints a very grim picture of society’s underbelly with virtually no hope or salvation in sight.So, why did I love reading this brief book so much? There are many reasons, really, but chief among them would have to be the author’s brutally direct but incredibly electric writing. In Fuckhead, Johnson perfectly captures the rhythms and mindset of an intelligent, but highly troubled young man who cannot manage to pull himself out the self-inflicted hole he’s put himself in and, for the most part, does not seem to care to try. Among the best of the stories, most of which were published independently in prestigious literary magazines before being collected into a single volume, were ‘Two Men, ‘Work’, ‘Emergency,' ‘The Other Man’, and ‘Beverly Home’. Although each of these works involve different events—and is set in various locales, from somewhere in the Midwest to Seattle to Phoenix, underscoring the shiftlessness of Fuckhead’s existence—by the end they combine into a fully realized narrative. There is nothing pretty or redemptive to be found in Jesus’ Son, but it is riveting nonetheless and an absolute classic.
    • 5/5
      as dark and powerful as everyone says.
    • 5/5
      I felt a true kinship with Denis Johnson while reading this book. I felt inspired to write time and again reading these stories. I savoured them over a long stretch, not wanting the experience to be over. Johnson's prose rings with the realism of Raymond Carver, and he's a better poet.

      You just...have to read this book. There's no one quote that will do it justice.
    • 5/5
      HOLY HELL!
      Jesus' Son took me for a much needed loop. The stories in here are all threaded together by a common narrator, set in different parts of the US, mostly midwest and Pacific Northwest. It wasn't so much the content but Johnson's controlled style and when he lets a bit of madness and beauty unfold that made this an outstanding collection to read. Reminded me of a tempered Hubert Selby Jr. in terms of content with more concentrated weirdness.
    • 5/5
      An out-and-out knockout. This one's a short read, but after I finished the first story I knew that I wanted to take my time with it. Oddly enough, I kept thinking of Raymond Carver while I read this one. I'm not a Carver fan: his stuff is too neatly arranged, too focused on loneliness, and too spare for my tastes. But Johnson's got Carver's knack for imbuing life's most ordinary moments with extraordinary significance. Of course, Carver focused almost exclusively on the straight crowd, while Johnson's broadcasting from another America altogether, one that's filled with junkies, drifters, and down-and-outs. Death always seems to be close at hand in these stories, but so are liberating moments of seemingly accidental transcendence. Among all the bad behavior, there's several lifetimes worth of love, yearning, camaraderie and hope. Johnson relates his stories in an easy, fluid, familiar voice, but the stories here aren't just reportage from the rougher edges of society: there's a touch of weird mystery and magic in most of them, too. Junkies are compared to mermaids, trips to score dope turn into epic journeys, elements and characters seemingly drawn from fairy tales and mythology pop up in the most unexpected situations, mind-altering drugs are never, ever refused. If Carver's America is all about routine and the daily grind, everything that happens in "Jesus' Son" is a potential doorway to some sublime, or surreal, encounter. This is due, at least in part, to the author's absolutely first-rate prose: his descriptions can be both wildly original and impressively precise, and he's capable of lending the most banal, tossed-off conversations enormous emotional resonance. Of course, he makes it look effortless, but that only goes to show how good a writer he really was. I suppose the other reason that Johnson's stories reminded me of Carver's is that they convey the enormous size of the American landscape in a similar sort of way. This is particularly true, I think, of the stories in "Jesus' Son" that are set in Iowa and mostly concern small-town drug addicts. His characters might be obsessed with getting their next fix, but Johnson also manages to convey the epic scale of the Midwestern plains, making them seem like a boundless, open space where anything might happen. Some readers may find the subject matter of these stories sort of distasteful, and I can understand that. But there's also something quintessentially American about them. For all the wandering that their characters do, part of the reason they work is that they seem so rooted in the American landscape. In Johnson's hands, scheming heroin addicts seem as much a part of the Midwest as cornfields. The subject matter can get pretty lurid, its characters -- no matter how desperate, addicted, or morally compromised, always come off as regular folks: there aren't any bohemians here. In a way, it's an incredibly deft reframing of what it means to live in, or write about, the United States, and that makes this little book of short stories seem downright important. Astonishing. Great. Five stars. Get your copy now.
    • 5/5
      I'm sure almost everyone reads this in one sitting. It isn't that many pages, and there are a lot of blank ones in there as well, and the type is spaced wider than usual--but you'll read it in one sitting because the words just flow off the page into your head. Everything here, whether it is the happenings in a home for the mentally ill, or in the emergency room, or in a car, just seems so real. Some live, some die, some just muddle on. Life is a mess, but somehow life is also beautiful. Riding along with Johnson never gets boring.
    • 5/5
      Read this book.

      It is difficult to tell you why. There is not much like it, outside of comparisons to short story giants like Carver. Beautiful, searing, and leaves you with a lasting buzz.
    • 4/5
      “The vine was different every day. Some of the most terrible things that had happened to me in my life had happened in here. But like the others I kept coming back.”“That moment in the bar, after the fight was narrowly averted, was like the green silence after the hailstorm. Somebody was buying a round of drinks. The cards were scattered on the table, face up, face down, and they seemed to foretell that whatever we did to one another would be washed away by liquor or explained away by sad songs.”This story collection, feels like a potent brew, cooked up by Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski and Lou Reed. A hallucinogenic stew of barflies, addicts, mental patients and misfits, living at the bottom or on the fringes of a derelict world. There is sadness and pain in these stories but there is also a glimmer of redemption. Obviously, this not for all tastes, some readers will flee in horror, but I found Johnson's wounded prose a transcendent joy.“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.”
    • 5/5
      JESUS' SON is a book in a class by itself. It's a little book of very short stories, but its language is what makes it unique. It's easy to see why so many of the late Denis Johnson's fans cite this as their favorite of all his work. I'm tempted to say, maybe it's because it's so short, so they don't have to devote much time to it. I read it in just a few hours, and it only took me that long because I kept pausing to enjoy - to savor - its rich imagery, its unusual descriptions. Here's a sample -"The mild spring evening, after several frozen winter months, was like a foreigner breathing in our faces. We took our passenger to a residential street where the buds were forcing themselves out the tips of branches and the seeds were moaning in the gardens." ("Two Men")Or here's another -"Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there." ("Car Crash while Hitchhiking")One more -"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, despite the smell, the slight, dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck's seams." ("The Other Man")Prose like this, scattered like jewels in all the stories - well, it's like poetry, extremely accessible poetry, poetry that works.But it's not all just beautiful language. Because the unnamed narrator (other than a nickname, F***head), is a hardcore abuser - of drugs, alcohol and women. A man living on the edge as he moves from state to state - Iowa, Arizona, Washington, etc. Not an admirable character, but an utterly human, unapologetic one. Sometimes using, sometimes in rehab or a hospital, drying out or going through detox, he's never anyone but himself. In one story, "Steady Hands at Seattle General," he confides to a fellow patient that he's a writer. One wonders, however, how a druggie like this could possibly be a writer.Denis Johnson knows about his subject though. After some early success as a poet, he lost the better part of two decades using and abusing drugs and alcohol, before he finally cleaned up and came back to writing, giving us several more fine books. He amassed a huge reader following. He died in May of this year of liver cancer, just 67. The book's title, by the way, comes from a line in a Lou Reed song. The song title? "Heroin." I understand now why JESUS' SON was included in a list of best American fiction of the last 25 years. This is a very powerful little book. And hey, it's short too, if that'll sway you to read it. But be forewarned: it will haunt you. My highest recommendation. Thank you, and R.I.P., Mr. Johnson.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
    • 2/5
      Another New Classic that does not fit the category of glad I read it. Bizarre actually.
    • 5/5
      I don't reread often, so I was happy to find that this collection thrills me as much as these stories did when I first read them almost 30 years ago. Johnson's use of language is still surprising—and considering all the fiction I've read since I was in my 20s, that's pretty impressive—and those swooping, propulsive sentences continue to delight me. That first graf of "Dirty Wedding" still does it for me—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, wiiped 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.—like an old flame who still, surprisingly, looks fine. I don't find his marginal folks as fascinating as I once did, no doubt because I'm middle-aged and staid and don't know or even really want to know characters like that anymore; no hint of there-but-for-the-grace-of-god in my heart these days. That's been replaced by a healthy middle-aged dose of compassion, which—pleasingly—deepens my appreciation of their hapless lot rather than dulls it. So really, cheers to Denis Johnson. I could sit down and unpack every sentence in this book and I still wouldn't be able to figure out how he does it, but he does. I should probably own a copy of this—I think I used to, and no doubt gave it away. I'm sure one will turn up someplace.
    • 5/5
      Vignettes of a hollow man with a hollow vein in an even more hollow Midwestern landscape puking up the ashes of the American Dream alongside a cadre of irredeemable characters. All at once, surprisingly, a hilarious and devastating book with characters you pity ad struggle to perceive as human, even though you know they exist, somewhere. Half dream, half wreck, despite the prose which is always beautiful and always present. Some of the best American short fiction since O'Connor and Hemingway.
    • 5/5
      One of those books that makes me want to give up writing because I'll never write anything that good.
    • 4/5
      Denis Johnson’s short stories set a standard in the late 20th century that has rarely been equalled. The voices of his narrators are raw, unadorned (except when wonder is the only appropriate reaction), unpretentious, and unprotected. They are typically lost young men seeking solace or oblivion in drink or drugs or sexual release. Only rarely, as with George in the much-praised “Emergency”, does a character’s goodness supervene on his situation and lack of comprehension. More often Johnson’s characters have a surfeit of venial sins which burble into the mortal. You can find them at sad dives like the Vine tavern wearing medical bracelets cheating each other out of quarters. These are not the noble poor who sometimes populate Carver stories, or the unheralded but self-believing geniuses of Kerouac. They have very few redeeming qualities and are marked only by their drive for their next hit of whatever.The writing is spare and lean and almost always surprising. Narrative cohesion is consistently undercut. It happens so often that the reader will wonder what is the point of such unreliable narrators. Truth, perhaps, is not meant to inhere in correspondence with the world, but rather with something created through the telling. A kind of narrative truth? Certainly the lack of fidelity to what really happened does not tell against our belief in these narrators. Indeed it may speak in their favour. At any rate it is a fascinating technique that you now see widespread. Johnson was not the first to employ such a strategy, but I think he does it better than many who came before.Apart from “Emergency”, which sparkles like the gem that it is, I would also point to “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” “Two Men,” “Out on Bail,” “Dundun,” and “The Other Man” as especially worthy of note. But now that I’ve named nearly all of the stories in the collection, I might just as well go on and say that any of the rest would be equally well worth a read. The stories are short but many of them will stay with you a very long time. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      This is the funniest book in the universe, for a moment, then a page later it's unbearably sad. The story of drug addict told in electrifying prose. Short and powerful, highly recommended
    • 4/5
      I would be the first to admit that my guilty book reading interest (I won’t go as far to say ‘pleasure’) is that of the ‘addiction, drugs, alcohol, mental health and/or messed up state’ genre. I suppose it comes from life and work experiences. I’m a social worker by background and for as long as I remember I’ve worked or studied in health and social care. I’m interested in the personal story, the human condition and often fascinated in how addiction impacts upon someones life, on those around them and the psychology of addiction. I am certainly not talking about glorification. With this in mind, it’s no surprise for me to say that I’ve read a number of fiction and non fiction in this area.As is often the case, fiction seems to be more believable than non fiction and there is often an element of truth. I’m thinking The Drinker by Hans Fallada, Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton and of course Junky by William S Burroughs. Jesus’ Son almost makes it.Jesus’ Son is a collection of 11 short stories all told from the experiences of the same person. It’s a very short book which can be read in one sitting. It can be confusing at times which is what I think it’s meant to be. It appears to be a well structured stream of consciousness (if that makes sense).We don’t know the current age of the narrator, I’m not sure we even know the gender (assumed to be a man) and we are certainly not provided with reference to the time frame of when most of the stories happened. What we do know is that the narrator is a recovering addict although he does not explicitly inform us of this.Each short story tells of a memorable occasion in his life be this an interesting person he met, where he was working or who he fell in love with. Maybe. In some stories the writing is vivid and graphic, although in the main it appears to tell of life which in reality is mundane and aimless. The physical act of drug use is mentioned fleetingly. The book mostly focuses upon the narrators actions whilst high, low and going through withdrawal from drugs and alcohol and it certainly provides us with the impression of the confusion and chaos in the mind of the narrator.“We lay down on a stretch of dusty plywood in the back of the truck with the day light against our eyelids and the fragrance of alfalfa thickening on our tongues.“I want to go to church” Georgie said.“Let’s go to the county fair.”“I’d like to worship. I would.”“They have these injured hawks and eagles there. From the Humane Society” I said.“I need a quiet chapel about now.” (p.63)Jesus’ Son is a well written journal, quick to read and easy to confuse. I don’t understand why I remain unsure as to what I really think of the book. There is a lot of hype which surrounds it and I always seem to be a little out of step in such cases. I would guess that my expectations for the book were out of step having read a number of different books in this genre which left me feeling more fulfilled (for want of a better word). I’m left feeling that there are things I have missed and maybe I need to read the book again. Nonetheless, it’s very much subjective and I feel that Jesus’ Son remains a well thought out, well written chronicle.
    • 3/5
      Despite myself I actually kind of got into this by the end. The stories are explicitly centered on one character, which gets around the problem of Lange's 'Dead Boys,' that all the protagonists are the same but meant to be different. It also means that the 'stories' that lack a plot, point, theme, structure and any interest whatsoever (and that's most of them, let's be honest) can be treated more like you treat the chapters in a novel which don't necessarily develop, but do contribute something else to the book. The great stories - Car Crash, Emergency, and Beverly Home - stand out all the more because the rest of them are so dull and pointless. In short, what looks to begin with like another glorification/damnation of junkie living turns out to be an admission that junkie life is deathly boring compared to what should be the dullness and cliched rubbish of 'rehabilitation,' 'detox' and narcotics anonymous.
      The catch is that, as in every junkie book I've ever read and will ever read, the narrator or, at the very least, the protagonist, is an emotional idiot. Anything which isn't violently painful or pointless is gloriously salvific and splendiferous. The options in this world are suffering, or Disneyfied technicolor. Perhaps that's what addiction does to you. But a large part of the dullness of that life is the black and white nature of it. And it doesn't make for the best book.
    • 4/5
      I'm giving this book four stars if only because I've been giving out five stars too willy-nilly and it's gotta stop. Am I going to go back and reevaluate books I've already rated five stars? No, probably not. Because I AM LAZY.

      That being said this book is great and I am a fool for not having read this sooner. Especially because I read Tree of Smoke and Train Dreams first. This book presents a world that I don't want to be a part of, yet I can't help but get the feeling that it is already all around us. It's scary, but the writing is beautiful.

      You should read this book sooner rather than later, then you won’t feel foolish like I do.
    • 3/5
      Raw poetry set into stories of all sorts of people down on their luck, usually with no one to blame but themselves.
    • 3/5
      Somewhere on the book jacket or in a review, I read that Johnson's stories offered a "surreal perspective" on American society. It doesn't seem surreal to me at all, just a take on our society from a viewpoint most mainstream folks rarely, if ever, encounter. These stories are weirdly captivating and quite well written.
    • 4/5
      Gritty, gritty, gritty, gritty, gritty.