Book Review: Jesus' Son is a book I've heard murmurs about for just about forever, and it didn't disappoint. Mainly it didn't disappoint by being nothing like what I might've expected. The unanticipated is its greatest strength. All is told in the first person by a hapless character who connects all the stories. He's not particularly appealing, does more harm than good, and is mostly buffeted by forces beyond his control. A book romanticizing the down and out, those living outside the law, whose affection for drugs is stronger than their desire for anything else, for whom ethics is mostly an unaffordable luxury. The kind of book favored by young men in their late teens and twenties. Denis Johnson's method in Jesus' Son is juxtaposing two seemingly unrelated events, finding some small meaning amidst an absurd situation, or taking a story to a swift conclusion that it never should have found. This is modern writing where words and sense are cut to the bone, the barest skeleton of story, but it's brilliant and it works. Stories begin in midstream, there's a history behind and an uncertain future ahead, details can be random. Yet the writing contains beauty and wisdom: "Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart? His left hand didn't know what his right hand was doing. It was only that certain important connections had been burned though." Jesus' Son could be the unholy love child of Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski, with its razor eye and the moments of humor, or perhaps an updated (if less starry-eyed) version of Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row. [4½★]
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