The decentralization doesn’t get in the way – it is the way. In Jesus’ Son, drug addiction is not only a plot point as it is in Fear and Loathing ( as I remember it), or an aesthetic conceit as in Naked Lunch (as I envision it), but something that has both corrupted and purified the texture of the book itself. If we lump it in with other famous pieces of drug lit like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Naked Lunch (I’ve read the former, but not the latter), and I think that’s one valid avenue of approach, one thing that distinguishes it in that subgenre is its ability to convey, on the structural level, the profound decentralization of a drug-addled, addicted state – not just someone who is high or drunk, but somebody submerged in addiction, whose life revolves around the acquisition and consumption of drugs. S ometimes you don’t have the right weak spots inside you, yet, for a good book to strike at I’d like to return to Angels at some point.Īnyway: Jesus’ Son. On the strength of Jesus’ Son alone I’d bet the disappointment is my fault, not the book’s. Scenes from it have stuck with me to this day, and come back to me anytime I think about the novel, are returning even as I write this sentence but I also recall a vague disappointment attendant upon finishing and processing it. I read Johnson’s novel Angels some – maybe as many as ten, Jesus Christ – years ago. Although each story functions as a discrete episode and can be read on its own (with “Two Men” and “The Other Man” being the only slight exceptions), reading Jesus’ Son front to back turns it into something other than a collection stories, but also other than a conventional novel: a micro-series of nested correspondences, a maze in miniature, a fragmented, distracted picaresque. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson is a collection of linked short stories, concerning the luminously turbulent life and experiences of an unnamed narrator, a young man whose life has spiraled off into drug and alcohol addiction.

If you like anything at all about what I’m trying to do with Demilecteur, please go check out Biblioklept, which was one of the primary inspirations for this blog.

First: many thanks to the excellent for pointing me in the direction of many fine books, most recently and notably 2666 and Jesus’ Son.

Jesus son by denis johnson