Monday, March 17, 2008
I FEEL LIKE JESUS' SON
I read Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson in time for the book group, then had to skip the meeting where we discussed it. Long story. A shame, because I really wanted to find out what others thought of this little book. I thought it was astounding, and I'm not sure why, because it has all the ingredients of a lousy book, the kind cranked out by self-absorbed amateurs: it's episodic, its passive hero bounces from drug-fueled escapade to bleary-eyed hangover and back again with little understanding of what's going on around him, the stories' settings aren't especially memorable, and the stories frequently stop to make a 'deep' point that seems dangerously tacked on. Yet the stories are near perfect gems, surprising and natural. Maybe it's Johnson's skill with language that holds everything together. Maybe its his general refusal, at times suspended, to judge himself or anything else, and thus make a refreshing departure from apologetic junkie memoirs.
Johnson, you may have heard, recently won the National Book Award for Tree of Smoke, a work which some people feel doesn't deserve the honor, or anything close to it; even the critics who praised the book have hinted that it's going to be one of those masterpieces that no one finishes, like Rushdie's Satanic Verses. But Jesus' Son is not even 200 pages, and for people with really short attention spans, there's always the movie.
I read Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson in time for the book group, then had to skip the meeting where we discussed it. Long story. A shame, because I really wanted to find out what others thought of this little book. I thought it was astounding, and I'm not sure why, because it has all the ingredients of a lousy book, the kind cranked out by self-absorbed amateurs: it's episodic, its passive hero bounces from drug-fueled escapade to bleary-eyed hangover and back again with little understanding of what's going on around him, the stories' settings aren't especially memorable, and the stories frequently stop to make a 'deep' point that seems dangerously tacked on. Yet the stories are near perfect gems, surprising and natural. Maybe it's Johnson's skill with language that holds everything together. Maybe its his general refusal, at times suspended, to judge himself or anything else, and thus make a refreshing departure from apologetic junkie memoirs.
Johnson, you may have heard, recently won the National Book Award for Tree of Smoke, a work which some people feel doesn't deserve the honor, or anything close to it; even the critics who praised the book have hinted that it's going to be one of those masterpieces that no one finishes, like Rushdie's Satanic Verses. But Jesus' Son is not even 200 pages, and for people with really short attention spans, there's always the movie.
# posted by toner_low @ 11:45 PM 
