Short Story Criticism | Johnson, Denis - Sven Birkerts (review date October-November 1993)

Sven Birkerts (review date October-November 1993)

SOURCE: Birkerts, Sven. Review of The Pugilist at Rest, by Thom Jones and Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson. Boston Review 18, no. 5 (October-November 1993): 30.

[In the following review of Jesus' Son, Birkerts contrasts the narrative style of Thom Jones's The Pugilist at Rest and Johnson's Jesus' Son to that of the American writer Raymond Carver.]

Prose styles, like hemlines, serve as an obscure barometer of changes in the cultural life. A barometer because they are in some way linked to the larger atmosphere (the Zeitgeist), and obscure because no one can quite determine how. We've come a long way since the days when Hemingway's clipped diction was universally understood as representing a generation's retraction of soul before the violence of history. Literary styles are now many and various, pitched to coterie audiences. Writers tend to work in the vein...

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