Jesus' Son
The most influential American story collection of the last 30 years. Johnson's druggy, visionary voice (part Carver, part Rimbaud) created a new register for American fiction. Every MFA student reads this and either despairs or gets inspired.
Two-star readers push back hardest on how women exist in these stories, mostly as objects of the narrator's fixation, and unfavorably compare the book to writers covering the same territory without that flaw: “compare this collection to, for example, lucia berlin's stories about addicts,” one suggests. Another flags a specific discomfort, saying “the way denis johnson writes about black people is weird.” Some find the insight into self-destruction unoriginal, Johnson's technical skill granted but the underlying observations not new: “I didn't need Denis Johnson to tell me” how ugly addiction gets. The book's outsized reputation, workshop-circuit canonization and a lopsided share of five-star ratings, makes a few readers suspicious the acclaim outruns the page, with one going so far as to say “if i see this book on a man's nightstand” it tells her something about him.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
