Jesus’ Son
By Denis Johnson
Epigraphs can be deceiving. Some are so unimportant that they act as a red herring. Some are jokes; occasionally between the author and only one other person. Denis Johnson begins his short story cycle, Jesus’ Son, with the lyrics, “When I’m rushing on my run/ And I feel like Jesus’ Son…”, quoting Lou Reed from The Velvet Underground’s song “Heroin”. It was my mistake to disregard the lyrics as nothing more than a source for the cycle’s name. Paying attention to the song’s title would have clued me in to the drug coursing through each of these stories. Instead, I realized a few sections in that this wasn’t a collection of varied characters bumping up against the edges of a society they live outside of, but one long bender following a singular character as he pinballs off everything in his path.
The difference between short story collection and cycle may be pedantic, but it does have purpose. Johnson writes in Jesus’ Son with a hazy clarity that confuses the linearity of the book. Describing his scenes in defined, physical ways while washing the intent of the main character’s actions, Johnson props up this unnamed narrator as not only the person perceiving everything as it unfolds, but the destructive force acting upon the gentle world he so often finds himself in.
I look forward to watching the film adaptation because when I picture the transition between stories, it feels less like encapsulated moments in the narrator’s life, and more like the moments of clarity between drug-induced black outs. Johnson’s writes such tragically human characters in vivid imagery, it’s no surprise it was adapted for the screen. I could pick any one of the stories from this book and fire off a description or piece of dialogue that will live in my head until the day I stop reading. Jesus’ Son takes a new turn with every story, and it’s never clear when exactly anything is happening. Whatever point in the narrator’s life you find yourself, the situation is going to explode, leaving him unfairly unscathed for the havoc he’s wrought on the world around him.