repulsemonkey's Full Review: Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son
Words change their meanings three times before they stabilize. Two years pass in a single sentence, and then double back without warning. Dreams blend into reality without acknowledgement. Simple observations--His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath. He wouldn’t be taking many more. I knew that, but he didn’t--yield to deeper investigations--I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth--and finally flourish into epiphany--I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real. Denis Johnson’s stories take on the form of the drugs his characters use--fast, loose, without regard for time or desire or clarity, scraping away at the perceived confusion of life only to end up more confused. And, somewhere in there, the truth floats up and fades just as quickly. And then, all of a sudden, there you are. And there you aren’t. And then you’re back in the hospital talking to the cotton balls.
The eleven episodes in Johnson’s Jesus’ Son occur in the hours of the day that don’t exist--the minutes after everyone stops dancing, the fluorescent lights pop on, and the crowd shuffles lazily back to their cars; three in the afternoon on a buddy’s twenty-first birthday and nobody cares; after the 24 bus has passed, but before it comes back again. The characters hardly ever have their own identities. If you remember them, fine. If not, fine. But Johnson sure-as-hell won’t go out of his way to impose ticks or manners or eccentricities on these people for the sake of mere identity. He simply allows their actions to speak for themselves. So you end up stumbling through Jesus’ Son like you stumble through life, clinging to some people (Michelle, the ex-girlfriend who attempts suicide in order to be saved but ends up killing herself accidentally) and forgetting others (the man from Cleveland who pretends he’s a Polish immigrant to get into other guys’ pants) until it becomes more convenient to forget the people you used to remember and remember the people you thought you’d forgotten.
Instead Jesus’ Son concerns itself with memory and experience, observing them feeding on one another until inseparable, until the present moment can’t be distinguished from that one time it snowed. Johnson never concerns himself with meaning, only things. “Work” follows two men to an abandoned house where they rip the copper wiring out of the walls to sell as scrap. They watch a naked redhead flying, attached to a kite, pulled by a boat along the river. Later, when the redhead shows up again, the narrator can’t be sure whether he actually saw her flying in the first place or simply stumbled into his friend’s dream. “Emergency” sees a hospital orderly pull a knife from a man’s eye. The same knife later frees eight baby rabbits from their dead mother’s stomach. “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” describes just that, and does it with an unsentimental, unforced poignancy that makes its final lines all the more chilling.
The nameless narrator stays hopped up on drugs--heroin, pills, alcohol--for nearly the entire book. “The linings of my veins feel scraped out,” he says. “I knew every raindrop by its name.” But, in the final story, he shows up clean. Now, instead of possessing an amorphous, jolting structure, Johnson’s prose bends toward a monotony dictated by bus-routes, part-time jobs and peeping in on a Mennonite showering. He never stoops low enough point out whether his narrator is happier on or off drugs, but the two periods of sobriety and excess stand in sharp contrast to one another, not because the narrator approaches them differently (during both periods he ambles through life with a wide-eyed wonderment), but because the things that occupy his imagination differ. On drugs, in “Work” and “Dirty Wedding” he watches the images flicker through the windows of busses and trains “turning in the windows like the images in a slot machine.” Off drugs, he finds himself obsessed with the purity of the Mennonite woman, whose husband ends an argument by washing her feet.
If his whip-smart observations are any indication (he describes Beverly Hills’ residents as “people wandering the streets with their heads shot off by money”), Johnson ambles through life with the same wide-eyed wonderment as his narrator. This allows him to describe the events in Jesus’ Son with staggering accuracy. Johnson writes better dialogue than most screenwriters, especially in “Steady Hands at Seattle General.” He lets his narrator be so candid that he can confess his desire to rape a woman in “Beverly Home” or make known that a man gave him an erection in “Dirty Wedding.” We watch him treat his girlfriend with sheer irreverence immediately after she gets an abortion. “What did they stick up you?” he asks. And, at the end of the book, he leaves you with an immeasurable amount of collected experience. You share his narrator’s memories, experiences and dreams, whether you like it or not--but Johnson never tries to explain their meanings. He lets you figure them out. Some things you remember, some you forget. That’s life.
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