tl;dr

Drug abuse, violence, the poor treatment of women, Denis Johnson doesn’t dabble in happy-clappy subjects (and his protagonist is a right old prick), but you can’t take your eyes off the electric, sometimes poetic always compelling prose.

opening remarks

With the publication of Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, his final, posthumous collection, I’d always planned to read Jesus’ Son his first collection published back in 1992.  Then I saw that the Backlisted podcast was recording an episode about Jesus’ Son, so I pushed it to the top of the list.

knee-jerk observations

The opening story, Car Crash While Hitchhiking, is precisely what it says it is.  The incident, though, isn’t a minor bingle but a bone-crunching, metal twisting, flesh rupturing accident.  Johnson’s prose is visceral and violent, with a distinct philosophical flavour:

In Two Men three mates find a mute man in the back of their car and decide to give him a lift home.  As humanitarian as that sounds there’s a mean streak to the story.  Their treatment of the stowaway is rough, unfriendly; he’s more a hindrance they can’t get rid of.  Moreover, the first-person narrator – the same narrator from the previous story; we will learn later that his nickname is “Fuckface” – is a prick, the sort who’ll shove his unwanted hands into a woman’s pants, then do a runner when the boyfriend comes looking for him.  But for all the nastiness the prose is sharp and tight, almost noir-ish (especially the end).  It also begins with a corker of a paragraph:
Out on Bail is a sad little ditty about broken men and broken lives.  Then again any story that ends with the line, “I am still alive” is unlikely to be a laugh riot:

In Dundun Fuckface and his mate, the titular Dundun, fail to get a man named McIness to the hospital before he dies from a gun-shot wound.  There’s a disposable attitude to life in this story that treats violent death (and brutality in general) as inevitable:

Although Work begins with Fuckface elbowing his girlfriend in the gut after a drug binge (seriously, he’s a top bloke), this is the most hopeful story (so far) in the collection.  OK, yes, like the previous pieces it still has that overriding sense of life wasted and corrupted, the death of the American dream maybe, but at least here Fuckface and his friend have money in their pockets from a hard day’s work… which did involve thieving copper… but still a hard day’s work:
After a series of depressing and nasty stories, Emergency is genuinely funny.  Fuckface recalls the time he worked in a hospital’s emergency room in the early 1970s.  He befriends an orderly named Georgie who spends most of his shift stoned on stolen pharmaceuticals.  Georgie, and his complete lack of care or self-awareness, is the highlight of the story:
Women regularly come off second best in these stories. Dirty Wedding is one such example:
The Other Man is a sequel to Two Men where Fuckface remembers that he forget to tell us about the second man he referred to in the previous story (the first man was the mute found in the back of his car).  As a piece of fiction it’s all a bit pointless, but then that seems to be a deliberate attitude of the collection.  These pieces are less about a coherent story and more about capturing the runaway thoughts of a drug-addled narrator:
I also don’t have much to say about Happy Hour though I did like this description of a sunset:
Steady Hands At Seattle General has Bill, another of Fuckface’s mates, recalling the two times his ex-wives shot him.  In a story that’s mostly dialogue, Johnson’s ear for the rhythm of speech comes to the fore.

In the final story, Beverly Home we find Fuckface working at a home for disabled people where he writes and publishes the facility’s newsletter.  The bulk of the piece has Fuckface spying on a woman through her window as she showers.  He becomes obsessed with the woman, and her husband, who he speculates are Mennonites far from home.  His desire to watch them having sex doesn’t go as planned.

As with all the stories in the collection, there’s a disorderly, fragmented nature to the narrative.  One event leads to another with no closure or resolution.  Although in the case of Beverly Home there’s a measure of optimism as Fuckface believes he is gradually recovering from alcohol and drug addiction.

The Gist Of It

It didn’t click with me straight away that the narrator in each piece is the same person (the delightfully named Fuckface).  It’s because the stories are so fractured and aimless.  It’s also because I’m a bit dim.

Anyway, Fuckhead isn’t a particularly nice person.  That could be due to the heroin and the alcohol or the people he hangs with most of whom are involved in drugs and petty crimes.  Still, Fuckhead’s treatment of women, a nasty streak that’s evident in a couple of the pieces, is hard to swallow.  For all that there’s a reflexive and philosophical bent to Fuckhead that makes these stories more than a just a litany of his misery.  In most of the pieces, there’s a moment or a snippet of dialogue that’s laugh out loud funny and even when Fuckhead’s rambling through a narrative the prose is evocative, a rough sort of poetry that leaves behind striking images that I won’t forget in a hurry.

I understand now why Denis Johnson’s death last year (2017) left so many bereft and why his final collection was met with such anticipation.  I look forward to reading it and, eventually, working through Johnson’s back catalogue.

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