Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Johnson, Denis - David Gates (review date February 1993)

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David Gates (review date February 1993)

SOURCE: Gates, David. “A Family's Darkest Secret: Inside the Domestic Bonds of Love and Brutality.” Newsweek 121, no. 6 (February 1993): 67.

[In the following excerpt, Gates offers a positive assessment of Jesus' Son.]

In Jesus' Son, Idaho-based Denis Johnson's masterfully bleak sequence of short stories narrated by a young heartland lowlife, brutality is unpredictable and unremarkable: shootings, stabbings, guns held to heads, heroin overdoses, gruesome car wrecks—and confrontations that don't turn violent only because the antagonists can't stay focused. But scarier still is when the narrator betrays his chronic state of hallucinatory befuddlement. “It was a Polish neighborhood somewhere or other,” he tells us at one point in his wanderings. “The Polish neighborhoods have that snow. They have that fruit with the light on it, they have that music you can't find.”

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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