It’s a beautiful thing to be surprised by a story, to have your expectations surpassed or subverted so consistently that you’re forced to abandon them all together. Finding such stories can feel impossible in a market saturated with books and movies that are more concerned with commercial success than artistic exploration.
But there are always exceptions to the rule, even if you have to go back 30 years to find it.
I’m here to recommend a diamond in the rough that has aged like fine wine, a book that contains not one, but 11 incredible stories that take you on a drug-induced ride of rural America.
The book is “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson, a short story collection (that takes its name from a Velvet Underground song) published in 1992.
The stories told are manic and splintered, putting you in the mind of the junkies the narrative centers around. Details are confused and contradictory, story threads are dropped and picked up haphazardly, and small bouts of schizophrenia are commonplace.
Despite their loose structure, the stories are linked by a common narrator and some common settings, like a dive-bar in Iowa full of people that “seemed to have escaped from someplace.”
Mixed in with the junkies and violence is a sense of shared humanity, an undercurrent of vulnerability that forces the reader to take a second look at those typically pushed aside.
A perfect example of how Johnson balances grimy surrealism with aching tenderness is in the story “Dirty Wedding.” The narrator (only known as “F***head”) remembers taking his girlfriend Michelle to get an abortion. After being kicked out of the clinic, he rides around on the train aimlessly, pondering the nature of his relationship with Michelle. He eventually reveals that Michelle left him for a different man, before she unraveled with a drug addiction like so many in the book.
The story is absurd, offensive, tragic and gorgeous. The kind of story that stays with you long after you put the book down, the kind that demands multiple readings.
Johnson’s voice through these stories is so distinctive and mesmerising that it just needs to speak for itself. Here is an excerpt from the end of “Dirty Wedding”:
When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn’t my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she’d done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child could be hurt by its mother.
A copy of “Jesus’ Son” can be found at the Chapel Hill Public Library and can be bought online for as low as $3.
Photo courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux
