Paperback of the week: Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

In his 2005 essay The Beards, Jonathan Lethem writes of Talking Heads that “in 1980 or 1981, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me”.

Fast forward 11 years, swap the album for the story collection Jesus’ Son, and this describes me. Denis Johnson’s freshly reissued novella, a cycle of weird, sad, funny and thrilling stories set mostly in 1970s Iowa, recounts the misadventures and tentative recovery of a young heroin addict and alcoholic known only as Fuckhead. Pulled together to clear the author’s $10,000 tax debt, it comprises stories Johnson had written early versions of years before, when newly sober, on an arts fellowship in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Thinking them too autobiographical, he put them in a drawer and forgot about them.

Spreading through the US’s burgeoning network of creative writing programmes, Jesus’ Son became one of the most influential books of the 1990s, infecting a generation of writers – and its readers were mostly writers – with its offhand brilliance. As Jenny Offill, then a postgrad writing student, put it to Johnson’s biographer Ted Geltner: “We all read it and then we all wanted to write it.” “This book,” says the writer Michael Cunningham, who knew Johnson in Provincetown, “seems to inspire the desire to write this book.”

That desire, which I felt myself deep into my 20s, takes root somewhere between the book’s seemingly freewheeling nature and the almost frictionless way it transmits itself from the page and into the reader’s brain. All you need do, you realise as you read, is follow one outstanding sentence with another for about 140 pages, and like a drug the book lets you believe such a thing is possible. 

Unlike his nine novels (including Train Dreams, adapted last year into an Oscar-nominated film), his compositional method for these stories was closer to how he wrote poetry: pinning to the wall stray, explosively powerful lines to insert when the opportunity arose. So it is that the stories’ numbed minimalism periodically cracks open to reveal an alien territory somewhere between religious rapture and psychedelic freakout.

The story Work begins: “I’d been staying at the Holiday Inn with my girlfriend, honestly the most beautiful woman I’d ever known, for three days under a phony name, shooting heroin.” Swap the heroin for gin and this might be a story by Johnson’s mentor, Raymond Carver. But later, of a remembered hailstorm, we read, “[a] clattering sound was tearing up my head as I staggered upright and opened the door on a vision I will never see again: Where are my women now, with their sweet wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards?” This register, and the way it meshes with the other, belongs to Johnson alone.

The stories hum with incident: burglaries and inept pursuits, fatal car crashes and gunshot wounds. Dispersed throughout, in fragments, are subtler details to be noticed on rereads, such as Fuckhead’s terrible loneliness. His friendships are all “false coalitions” based on “something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn’t yet come to light”.

Having hit rock bottom multiple times – stealing a dead man’s social security cheques to buy heroin, robbing pharmacies, punching his girlfriend in the stomach – Fuckhead moves to Seattle then Arizona on his path to recovery. It is not an uncomplicated one. Even in the redemptive final story, Beverly Home, he spies on a woman and fantasises about raping her. 

But compassion nestles alongside cruelty. Working at an old people’s home, he walks among the residents, “greeting everybody and grasping their hands”. He does it “because they needed to be touched, and they didn’t get much of that”. At the last, the outcast becomes the vessel of companionship.

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson is published by Granta Books. Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £8.99 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Ron Koeberer/Millennium Images, UK