““Downpour Raked the Asphalt and Gurgled in the Ruts” : The Harsh Prose of Jesus' Son
review by Alissa Nielsen
Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson
Harper Perennial, 1993
Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son shows the harsh world of a struggling addict through startling prose, contrast and narrative distance. These eleven short stories are all told by the same nameless narrator, a man who drifts from one bad situation to another, passively reacting to car crashes, abortions, overdoses and murders. The distance of the narrator coupled with ferocious prose and deranged wit make these violent stories complex and realistic.
In the first story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” Johnson uses contrast, describing horrible events through lyrical prose. “Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead...What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined and eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere”(11). This paragraph is not only well crafted (poetic and symbolic) but really defines the protagonist/narrator. Instead of focusing in on the brutality of death, Johnson hones in on the survivor through the eyes of a passive, messed-up stranger. This distance engages readers in a unique way -- it allows them to have their own feelings about the situation and shows the desensitization that the narrator has due to alcoholism and drug addition.
Johnson evokes the emotion and thoughts of an addict through setting, “I looked down the length of the Vine. It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn't going anywhere. The people all seemed to have escaped from someplace – I saw plastic hospital name bracelets on several wrists”(36), through character description, “His eyeballs look like he bought them in a joke shop. It doesn't occur to me, as I pity this extraterrestrial, that in my life I've taken as much as he has”(77) and inner dialogue, “They ran a few syringesful into me, and I felt like I'd turned from a light, Styrofoam thing, into a person” (129). It is clear, from the above quotes, that the narrator doesn't feel alive in his sober life. Johnson shows this brilliantly by using, as Ellen Bass would say, “metaphors outside the garden,” or metaphors that have less to do with being alive and more to do with the deadness the narrator feels when he's not using.
The narrative distance is very close at times (reflective, lonely, pained) while other times, during very severe situations, the narrator is distance and apathetic. In the story “Emergency” the narrator nonchalantly watches people dying in the ER, sees a man come in with a knife in his eye, and all he can think about is pills, “I stood around looking at charts and chewing up more of Georgie's pills. Some of them tasted the way urine smells, some of them burned, some of them tasted like chalk” (75). The narrator uses distance, passive language when talking about rape and murder, then intimate and active prosaic feelings after surviving these events. Through this the reader sees this is a character whose only validation in life is through the highs and lows of survival.
When writing about really messed-up situations there is always a tendency for a writer to go too far. Too much description can cause the reader to feel victim to the incident, thus they stop reading. Other times an author might try to sentimentalize, trivialize or moralize the situation, which again, causes the reader to feel awkward and put down the book. I think there needs to be a balance, there should be enough description to feel real, but enough distance to allow the reader to develop their emotions on their own. In Jesus' Son, Johnson succeeds in providing this delicate balance.”
