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

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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