Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson's collection of linked stories, Jesus' Son (1992), is as tense and precise a narration as any I've come across and about as dark as it can get, which would be an unbearable combination of forces were it not for Johnson's subtle wit and, perhaps more important, his sympathy for his characters and their despair. Too often writers create characters and settings of darkness and decrepitude to try to achieve an effect - shock, revulsion - but w DJ there is an abiding sense of love for his characters (including the narrator who may be a version of himself in harder times). This love is the light reflected in the title; no matter how destitute and corrupt his characters - thieves, addicts, pimps, pushers, brawlers - he is always thinking and believing that they have spiritual worth and may be saved. Two really great stories appear together: Emergency (a man comes into the Erne a knife stuck in his eye - you would not believe that this could be a darkly comic story, but it is) and a story the narrator tells about a day in his youth - 20 years or so back; his survival to tell these tales is significant- when his girlfriend has an abortion and he rides the el train in guilt and anger trying to come to terms w what it means to terminate a pregnancy. He can't explain his anger nor his self-destructive behavior. I regret taking so long to come to these stories.

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