The Start and Jesus' Son

I'm starting up this blog, because I had to read a book for a class, and the Professor said it was a good book. It was not a great book, so I'm going to pass on my knowledge of this books to others. Every few weeks (when I finish book), I'll put up a review, that goes in depth about the book. It won't be something like "I hated this book, because Denis Johnson is stupid."

In between books I'll talk about short stories that are somewhere on the web out there, because people say the short story is dying, and I don't want it to. The short stories will be from well known magazines (like the New Yorker) to ones that might not even have a print version.

Jesus' Son
by Denis Johnson

This book is extremely strange, and goes into a subject that not many authors are willing to deal with: drug addiction. The main character and narrator is Fuckhead, a man in what seems like his early twenties who has a problem with drugs and alcohol. The collection of short stories tell random events in his life that don't make much sense alone, though they were all published in big name Lit Mags before appearing in this collection.

The problem with this book lies in the fact that all of the stories are plotless. Denis Johnson is a great writer, but the lack of plot was not kind. The reader is left confused at the end of many of the stories, simply because (s)he was not sure what (s)he just read. In the worst story in the collection, "Out on Bail," the narrator jumps around between years without much of an explanation for the reader. This could be taken as a literary effect to show that the narrator was lost in time, but it only left me confused. To add to the confusion of this story, one of the characters, Jack Hotel, dies at the end, yet appears in the next story "Dundun." As I read the book I kept asking, "Where in his life am I?"

Getting past this odd form of experimental literature, I also couldn't like the main character, whose only name we get is F*ckhead. He seemed pretty much like a worthless person, who didn't care about life. He does drugs, he hates to work, because it "messes with his high," and I'm supposed to care that he's trying to change at the end? His change though, isn't something to congratulate F*ckhead on. His passions at the end of the book include having sex with cripples but not wanting to build an actual relationship, and becoming a voyeur for a Mennonite woman who lives by the busstop.

It was nice to see that the character joined AA and NA by the end of the book, but he didn't seem to care about going there. From his actions (his new addiction with Mennonites), I get more of the feeling that he's just pushing his addiction to something else, so he can get past the drugs/alcohol. It's like a smoker, trying to quit, but ends up gaining forty pounds because they started eating to feel the nicotine void. Will F*ckhead every become "normal" in the sense of a useful member of society? Denis Johnson leaves it ambiguous yet hopeful, but I don't think so.

2 stars.

Next Novel: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore