[In the following positive review, Sutherland examines Johnson's prose in Jesus' Son.]

Denis Johnson's title is taken from Lou Reed's song “Heroin”—“When I'm rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus' Son.” What follows is a bundle of short stories all of which revolve obsessively around drugs and booze. Stylistically, Johnson comes across as fourth-generation Beat, following the substance-abuse line that descends from Kerouac, through Burroughs and Charles Bukowski to the films of Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho). The eleven stories in Jesus' Son are narrated by a nameless young addict who drifts from Chicago, to Iowa, to Seattle (where he seems happiest) to Arizona. Sometimes he works as an orderly in the Emergency Room of a hospital—where he and a disorderly buddy raid the pharmacy for drugs. Sometimes he burgles. At one point, he is in love with a belly dancer called Angelique. On another occasion, he clumsily tries to set up adultery with a woman, two days married, but somehow they are too drunk to get to bed.

Sometimes the hero is high, sometimes nodding, most times strung out. There is no sequence to the stories. A character called Hotel ODs in one story, and mysteriously comes back to life in the next. Some of the stories are nightmarish—the first narrates a particularly unpleasant car crash from which the hitchhiking hero walks away, leaving behind a mess of blood, metal and bone. Drunks are lucky. In another story, a patient walks into a hospital emergency room with a “hunting-knife kind of thing” sticking out of his eye (his one good eye, it emerges). Mostly, however, the narrator looks at the world with the whimsicality of the professional inebriate. “Happy Hour” describes that daily American ritual with the detached gaze of a Martian and a vocabulary reduced to its bare elements by a drinking day that has started considerably earlier:

The motor traffic was relentless, the sidewalks were crowded, the people were preoccupied and mean, because Happy Hour was also Rush Hour.

During Happy Hour, when you pay for one drink, he gives you two.

Happy Hour lasts two hours.

The story ends in a bar, with the hero buying a downer so big he thinks it must be a horse pill. He is put straight by the helpful nurse with the black eye who sells it to him: “For horses they squirt paste in its mouth. … The paste is so sticky the horse can't spit it out. They don't make horse pills anymore.”

It is only in the closing pages that the structure of the whole collection falls into place. In the penultimate story, the hero is in a detox centre, two days clean and sober. In the last, he is a “recovering” addict-alcoholic, several weeks clean and sober. These stories are, it emerges, what in AA and NA are called “drunkalogs,” that is, the experiences which members of the fellowship “share” with each other—reliving their past debaucheries as an educational experience for themselves and the group. The hero is not nameless, but “anonymous,” as the drills of AA require.

Recovering drunks are good storytellers. Anyone wanting the best entertainment available for a dollar should drop by any of the dozens of “meetings” available nightly—particularly Friday and Saturday nightly—in American cities. (British AA/NA meetings are less fun and probably best avoided unless you really need what they have to offer.) But there seems to be a cross-purpose in Johnson's use of the AA motif. For the faithful, drunkalogs are supposed to be a kind of aversion therapy. Here, they are suffused with a Baudelairen poetry and shot through with a comedy that makes drunkenness seem—as the title implies—a holy state. When Johnson describes night falling, you envy the drunk his gift of words and fancy that a liver and a few million brain cells might not be too high a price to pay: “The sky was a bruised red shot with black, almost exactly the colors of a tattoo. Sunset had two minutes left to live.”