Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Johnson, Denis - Daniel McGuiness (review date summer 1993)

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Daniel McGuiness (review date summer 1993)

SOURCE: McGuiness, Daniel. Review of Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson. Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 3 (summer 1993): 405-06.

[In the following laudatory review of Jesus' Son, McGuiness finds a similarity between Johnson's verse and his short fiction.]

Denis Johnson's career seems somehow geometrical, graphable, perhaps parabolic: the poems at the start, the novels in the middle, the short stories lately. Whether the parabola sweeps to an apogee or drops like your phoneline under the weight of snow is a matter of personal taste, but the line's start and stop do, nonetheless, figure into something like equilibrium. It's the same blighted landscape of addiction, reckless rock-and-roll love, and the benighted days of the American underclass that we return to in these new stories. It is perhaps no accident that Johnson's other work lately has been in journalism: quirky, apocalyptic...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Kirkus Reviews (review date 1 October 1992)
   2. Michiko Kakutani (review date 11 December 1992)
   3. James McManus (review date 27 December 1992)
   4. Marianne Wiggins (review date 15 February 1993)
   5. Todd Grimson (review date 28 February 1993)
   6. David Gates (review date February 1993)
   7. Jack Miles (review date June 1993)
   8. John Sutherland (review date 2 July 1993)
   9. Daria Donnelly (review date 13 August 1993)
   10. Daniel McGuiness (review date summer 1993)
   11. Sven Birkerts (review date October-November 1993)
   12. Denis Johnson (essay date 1998)
   13. Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 May 2000)
   14. Publishers Weekly (review date 15 May 2000)
   15. Susan Salter Reynolds (review date 25 June 2000)
   16. Robert Stone (review date 9 July 2000)
   17. Richard Eder (review date 14 July 2000)
   18. Economist (review date 15 July 2000)
   19. John Updike (review date 24 July 2000)
   20. David Gates (review date 31 July 2000)
   21. Susan Yuzna (essay date 13 August 2000)
   22. Robert McClure Smith (essay date winter 2001)
   23. Irving Malin (review date spring 2001)
   24. Timothy L. Parrish (essay date fall 2001)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. John Updike