Short Story Criticism | Johnson, Denis - James McManus (review date 27 December 1992)

James McManus (review date 27 December 1992)

SOURCE: McManus, James. “The Road from Detox.” New York Times Book Review 97, no. 12 (27 December 1992): 5.

[In the following favorable assessment, McManus provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Jesus' Son.]

Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is his fifth book of fiction, the previous four being novels with similar preoccupations: loveless promiscuity, the abuse of narcotics and alcohol, the debilitating effects of parental neglect and the sometimes violent paradoxes inherent in the Christian notions of salvation and self-sacrifice. His prose, especially in this book and in the novels Angels and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, consistently generates imagery of ferocious intensity, much of it shaded with a menacing, even deranged sense of humor. No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked “insensitivity” in an effort to depict the pathology of...

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