His humor is that of a boy who can’t be serious. Yet the narrator is likeable because, for all his guilt, he seems innocent in a childlike way. These stories are about passivity, the inability to change. One of the book’s unusual achievements is to subvert the convention that the main character initiates action leading to change. All I’m asking is just punish me and get it over with.”Ī similar, oft-quoted scene occurs in “Emergency” (honored along with “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” in The Best American Short Stories): the narrator expects nothing less than the Second Coming. “Oh God, if he does, then we’re comrades and so on, forever. The interior filled up with light so that for two seconds you could have read a book. A spasm ran through me so hard it shook the car. In an earlier scene, his fear of a man who may be seeking revenge on him takes on religious dimensions: Ostensibly the narrator doesn’t care that the man he seeks (the woman’s lover) has fled, but he is also going to make the woman sorry because he doesn’t care, has lost his ability to care. You’re going to be sorry.” The line reveals much. I want to try for the Kingdom if I can / Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man.” Johnson’s narrator is a failure as a man, but his stories are funny and spellbinding, full of surprises.Īt the end of “Two Men,” the narrator pushes a woman’s face into a rug, presses a gun against her temple, and says, “I don’t care.

His current book draws its inspiration from Lou Reed’s “Heroin”: “When I’m rushing on my run / And I feel just like Jesus’ son…” Elsewhere in the song, Reed sings, “Thank God that I’m not aware / Thank God that I just don’t care…. Johnson came to short stories after finishing two poetry collections and four novels: Angels, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, and last year’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. Yet he cannot escape being human - human with a religious subconscious that makes his life hell.

His unnamed narrator wanders purposeless and with little past, bent on burning out his self-awareness through drugs and alcohol. In Jesus’ Son, his first collection of stories, Denis Johnson records how far a soul can run from God and still be hounded by Jesus.

Jesus son short stories