what can i say, there was another graduation today. the service was in this catholic church. i brought the pain, i.e. pulled a method man. given the book title, i feel like people were a little less judgemental. i hadn't read tree of smoke or anything by denis johnson, and (honestly?) have enjoyed publicly confusing him with dennis cooper, another impossibly cool/edgy/drugs/dicks&pussies writer type liked by all the wrong people. i'll get around to cooper soon and regret that last sentence eventually, or at the very least validate it by my liking him. but either way. i heard this guy wrote short trippy sentences and put them in a first-person mouth and (i only imagined) left things *totally unresolved* and *totally crazy* every fucking story. which having done so myself, and knowing this to be catnip for the semi-intellectual set and empty shorthand for mariana trench levels of depth, for not meaning but the possibility that someone possibly means something somewhere, possibly--well as you can see i was skeptical!these stories i read twice and often three times. they're unhinged and happen on the road or in places yellowed by fluorescent lights: subway cars, hospitals, bars, VFW posts, places you drive by and wonder who exactly goes in there. which is to say the narrator is not unlike the people he encounters--everybody's a little off, there's hardly a straight man. the stories are more like riffs, tough to sustain so smartly kept short. i liked them the first time because they're funny and i liked the narrator, who is game for anything (e.g. stealing copper wire from abandoned houses; hitchhiking; chasing people in cars), for whom banalities proceed with huck-like significance, who says in the first story, perhaps you've heard, "i knew every raindrop by its name." sorry, that's just awesome. so is that sentence in "two men," where the narrator is openly aggravated over having to tote around this drifter who passed out in his car, then says:'''"Oh, let's just take him wherever he wants to go." I didn't want to go home. My wife was different than she used to be, and we had a six-month-old baby I was afraid of, a little son.'''you wonder how these people survive or why they'd ever want to. you hate yourself for thinking that but still. i forget which story the narrator says he only remembers the sunny days, but that's when it occurred to me how brilliant this book is. ok i just looked it up. it's in "happy hour", he's on a bus:"The weather outside was clear and calm. Most days in Seattle are grey, but now I remember only the sunny ones."as an articulation of one's unreliability, you can't do much better--these stories are his sunny ones, and it dawned on me at least that this narrator simply doesn't exist outside of these stories. he redeems himself by telling them. it also clues you into the style, why the trippiness/groundlessness works so well on a sentence level, hallucinations and reality given equal weight, plus the eerie way in which the narrator believes he knows what will happen before it actually happens. this part is a little on the nose but i don't think i'm reading too much into the fold of style/theme, cf this part in "car crash', when the narrator survives a car crash:"The man hanging out of the wrecked car was still alive as I passed, and I stopped, grown a little more used to the idea now of how really badly broken he was, and made sure there was nothing I could do. He was snoring loudly and rudely. His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath. He wouldn't be taking many more. I knew that, but he didn't, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person's life on this earth. I don't mean that we all end up dead, that's not the great pity. I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn't tell him what was real."anyway, wow, it's nice to be excited.
Dennis Johnson has a good way to describe things and has placed trouble riddled characters amongst some literal beauty.A collection of stories tied together with a common theme of struggle and drugs.He brings your eyes into the lives of characters on this earth with problems.The few stories I mention are...Car crash while hitchhikingAs the title say a powerful descriptive story where a hitchhiker is involved in an accident with a family including a baby.Visceral and shows very well all that the character experiences.Out on bailA friend is out of bail on an armed robbery charge. They drift around town locate a usual drink place and talk. Time passes places is gone they drift more into heroine and stealing they live a dangerous life one of them the two friends doesn't make it through life safely.Good tight story.DundunYou cant help thinking the narrator is a sociopath. He mentions possibly he doesn't know what he does and may still have heart due to him not knowing what his left hand to his right hand is doing.Your given a glimpse again of some drug users and violent characters, with death also contain within.EmergencyStory of two hospital workers, a nurse and a orderly. They steal drugs from the hospital they work at and get high frequently. While off duty they go for a wild ride, they stop at a fun fair, they knock down a rabbit under the influence of drugs and they find themselves also lost. That one rabbit had many baby rabbits alive nearby so Georgie decides to take care of them but he can't even help himself too high and tired.Your taken through a wild day in the life of these two characters.Beverley homeMaybe the better story of the collection along with emergency.The main character has taken a job at a home for the terminally ill and sick. He's a drug addict on therapy and trying to quit, he also has a tendency to be a voyeur a peeping tom on a religious couple, Mennonites and from near their window he sees all, their prayer, their religious readings and their love.In the home he finds a sense of belonging, people with a struggle.Some lines I noted "The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts." "Under Midwestern clouds like great grey brains." "We took our passenger to a residential street where the buds were forcing themselves out of the tips of branches and the seeds were moaning in the gardens." "This situation had been a secret until now, like a terminal disease." "There moments in the Vine like that one--where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons." "..,it burbled like a machine that polishes stones all night." Review along with the movie trailer available @http://more2read.com/review/jesus-son-by-denis-johnson/
What do You think about Jesus' Son (1993)?
Is there a way of writing the right stories about the right people,telling everything neatly from start to finish. An Uppercase letter starting the story and a full stop waiting at the end. A boy meeting girl on the first page and walking away with her in the last one.Or are stories like these...snapshots of nightmares which some would call hell, but is home to some. Where beautiful sentences strike you out of the blue, so beautiful that you read them again and again, flashes of lightning in a desolate sky.A sky that won't shed tears for us anymore.And if it did,I knew every raindrop by its name.Raindrops that cannot purify our soul. Our soul that is a ghost beyond redemption running hopeless to find love. Love that was never ours in first place.With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.So, what if you are loved.And the night, oh the night when the windfull of outer space gnaws at our faces; that wished for,gentle, deceptive one waiting painfully for the lonely heart - she'd stay on for anyone. Is she easier on lovers?Ah,but they only use each other to hide what awaits them. -Rilke
—rahul
Denis Johnson took the fringe sensibilities of The Beats, added his own raw poetic touches, nicked a line from Lou Reed for the title, and ended up with an intensely unsettling collection of stories that prefigured to a T the drug classic Trainspotting. You may wonder at first if the unnamed narrator of these accounts could really be such an uncaring cad. Well, as a bottom line, maybe so. But the thoughts of murder, the thieving, and the ultra-callous disregard for fellow man were in large part a function of the skag, the booze, and the stolen pharmaceuticals. This does not excuse the insensitivity and messed up behavior so much as it explains the eeriness, fragmentation, and reflexive anger. But amidst the distortions, bits of clarity stand out. And in contrast to the alienation in dull shades of gray, a kindness of any tint will catch the eye. Has it ever been proposed as an exercise in creative writing to imagine being (if not actually being) high as a kite? What am I saying? Of course it has. And abstract, luminous words have come from such otherworldly mindsets, I’m sure. In fact, I would argue that this short book set in the psychedelic 70’s is a prime case in point. It figures, with Johnson also being a poet, that the writing would be taut and expressive. He captures the sentiments of the down-and-out so well, too. For example, he describes how the “tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar” and how a gunshot victim should be happy he’s getting “Haldol pumped by the quart.” The drug scene is the backdrop, but the fallout is the real focus. ” I'd been staying at the Holiday Inn with my with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I'd ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin. We made love in the bed, ate steaks in the restaurant, shot up in the john, puked, cried, accused one another, begged of one another, forgave, promised, and carried one another to heaven.”My favorite parts were when little hints of what it means to be human snuck into the stories. It didn’t always put the narrator in a favorable light, but usually pointed to something redeemable within him. He appreciated co-worker and co-addict Georgie for telling a friend of a friend who was seriously AWOL that he’d help get him to Canada. Georgie also wanted to save the baby rabbits of the mother he ran over with his car. Another story described the narrator’s best day ever, one where he and a friend made $28 each from honest labors stripping copper wire out of the friend’s abandoned house and then celebrating with their favorite bartender pouring them double shots but charging them only for singles.The last story was set at Beverly Home, a place for senile, disabled, and disfigured adults where the narrator was given a part-time job as the newsletter writer and a point of human contact for those rarely touched. He was off drugs and sober at this point, and regaining his health. His straight and narrow path was still a little skewed, though, when he discovered a Mennonite woman who happened to time her shower every day as he passed by her place after work. As immoral as his actions were, though, there was a sense that he’d turned the corner (view spoiler)[I was going to say he turned the corner to find an odd looking guy with a long beard but no mustache about to aim a shotgun his way, but I’d be taking too much literary license saying that. It never happened. (hide spoiler)]
—Steve
I don't think I was fair to this book. I listened to the audiobook, which was both fantastic and perhaps a mistake... The narrator, Will Patton, was a perfect choice for this short story collection, but the audio format left no time to digest each story before being thrust into the next one... And I definitely felt I needed some digesting time for this collection. Some of the stories I still remember clearly and found completely mesmerising, others left no impression on me at all. And I wonder how much of that is due to me still thinking about the previous story while the audiobook moved on... Parts of this I would rate 5 stars, other parts I've already forgotten. It also didn't help that I had a week long break in the middle while I listened to something else. I would definitely like to revisit this, either in physical form or again as an audiobook, but when I'm not driving and can stop for a breather between each story.
—Tanya (aka ListObsessedReader)
