Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson

review by: Matthew Scrivner
Date: 10/18/02

Those of you familiar with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground will recognize the title of this book from the lyrics of the song Heroin. It is about a heroin addict. But not really. Really the heroin addiction is incidental, and what we are witnessing is some sort of mystic or spiritual struggle that the character, named only once or twice throughout the book as "Fuckhead," progresses through in a world fogged by desire and need. The book is a mere 179 pages, and is probably the most accessible of my list. It progresses from a violent car wreck at the beginning, to criminal acts and drug use, to sacrifice, overdose, voyeurism, relief, and demonstrates throughout all of it the singular and joyous realization that all these things are beautiful. Vomiting and blood and shit and car accidents and screaming are beautiful. Gory rabbit embryos and naked windsurfing women are beautiful. Death is beautiful.

I need to emphasize here that part of the experience of this book is the language it was written in. Johnson is actually a poet before he is a novelist (see his collection Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly for an example.) The narrative here is from a poet's voice, a poet's eye, distilling everything down to it's glowing core. In one scene, we witness the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a head-on collision that kills a solitary male driver, and in the hum of a hospital emergency room, Johnson writes:

"Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead.... What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere."

This is not the exception, but the rule in this work. Passage after passage we are faced with language as brutally honest and as tightly compressed as this, imagery that bursts into our heads and scalds our fingertips. Of the four books on this list, this is the book I lend to friends and never see again.