Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Johnson, Denis - Michiko Kakutani (review date 11 December 1992)

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Michiko Kakutani (review date 11 December 1992)

SOURCE: Kakutani, Michiko. “Stories That Range from Bleak to Bleaker.” New York Times (11 December 1992): C31.

[In the following review, Kakutani commends Johnson's poetic language and utilization of metaphor and wordplay in the stories in Jesus' Son.]

The characters in Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson's savage new collection of stories, which takes its title from the Lou Reed song “Heroin,” are all lost souls, waiting eagerly or despondently for salvation. Like their counterparts in Fiskadoro and Angels, they are sinners and misfits, the lost, the damned, the desperate and the forgotten. Out of their bleak, frightening experiences, Mr. Johnson manages to extract a harsh, lovely poetry; in their violent, seemingly random lives, he is able to find modern-day parables that glow with a strange, radioactive light.

The narrator of these interlinked stories is a young,...

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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