Jesus' Son

Jesus’s Son often makes its way onto lists of the best short story collections. I finally nabbed a copy when I was in New York earlier this year. Slim little thing, barely over 100 pages.

While I enjoyed Jesus’s Son, I don’t have a lot to say because I read it on a flight to Tokyo. Planes don’t make great reading environments. In fact, what you read on planes should probably be limited to whatever’s available in airport bookstores. The bangin’ bookstore at the domestic terminal in Newark is probably the only exception. Surprisingly deep stack just across from Shake Shack. They also sell records for some reason. Not sure who buys LPs in the airport.

Anyway, Jesus’s Son follows an unnamed character across several short stories. It all takes place in a shallow suburban underworld that exists somewhere between misdemeanors and felonies. People fight. People take drugs. It all feels real and undesirable.

Denis Johnson’s writing reminds me of Charles D’Ambrosio’s. These are slice-of-life stories cut from a stale cake. There’s an accuracy and rawness in the writing that’s easy to underestimate. The flow from one observation to the next moves with the speed of thought, including the gaps that come with it, rather than the neat linear structures that define lesser fiction.

The derelict subject matter leads me to believe that Johnson came of age around the people and places he writes about. In “Emergency,” a guy with a knife in his eye comes into the emergency room at 3 a.m. “The blade was buried to the hilt in the outside corner of his left eye. It was a hunting knife kind of thing.” The knife is messing with the guy’s brain. Ouch. He gets the help he needs.

That line demonstrates Johnson’s tact. Specifically, “hunting knife kind of thing.” Johnson didn’t need to write “thing.” Most of us have an idea what a hunting knife looks like. The addition brings us into the character a little more. He’s processing the situation. It reminded me of How Fiction Works, in which James Wood analyzes Nabokov’s use of “leggy thing” to describe a nutcracker in Pnin.

Another scene stands out in “Steady Hands at Seattle General.” The protagonist shaves someone in the hospital. One recounts a dream to the other. They talk about living in Seattle and life in general. The one guy has been shot twice before. The story ends with this exchange:

“Hey. You’re doing fine.”
“Talk into here.”
“Talk into your bullet hole?”
“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.”

It’s real and surreal at the same time. I like it.