Every once in a while, Mom would insert her thoughts on a certain subject, like their first home and the Korean War experience in Lubbock, Texas. He covered the Depression and his time in the military service, his courtship of Mom, their early years, being recalled into the service for the Korean War, and even his thoughts on work and golf. Of course, he started with his birth and named siblings and gave a bit of history about the covered wagon journey from Lead Hill, Arkansas, where he was born, to Oklahoma. We kids encouraged him to write about his life, and he started writing in 1995. I wouldn’t recommend Jesus’ Son to anyone other than students of literature or those fascinated by deprivation and the realities of substance abuse.Dad wrote his memoir after friend Cathy Kellough gave him an old computer and printer. Is it worthy of its accolades?– Probably, but are the accolades worthy of your attention? They don’t seem to be worthy of mine, and while that is most likely due to my ignorance, it doesn’t change their limited utility. It is readable, interesting and provides an insightful appreciation of its subject matter. To say this book tested my patience, both as a reader and a reviewer, would be an understatement. To Dennis’ credit, the feelings of disgust and disappointment he created made an otherwise banal reality, rehab, seem like a satisfying, happy and hopeful ending. The second truth was that the down-and-out narrator had some kind of hopeful appeal about him, which kept me engaged until the end. It is a small book, but it was also because Dennis kept my curiosity aroused and gave me enough sense of the situation, without understanding it completely, to move rapidly through the story. On reflection, the first truth I discovered was that I read Jesus’ Son very quickly. Such reviews were one of the original motivating factors for to provide straightforward, transparent, subjective reviews that people could understand. This reaction was reinforced when I read the republication of the New Yorkers review of Jesus’ Son, which was full of obscure references to artistic style that not even Google understands, such as the ‘trapdoor cadence’ of a sentence. For example, the Wikipedia article on this book starts off by suggesting it is “famous for its seemingly chaotic narrative style.” In anything but the arts this would otherwise be thought of negatively. My initial reaction was that Jesus’s Son represents many of the things I abhor in the arts, especially the opaque and inconsistent evaluation criteria of critical acclaim. My best guess is that this book is an illustrative account, in both form and narrative, of the travails of substance abuse intended to solicit compassion and understanding of the fragilities of humanity. These are all true, Jesus’ Son does touch on all of these issues and themes, but rarely is an individual issue explored or examined coherently for more than a few pages. Other reviews will tell you it is about shame and compassion for humanity in all its forms, especially its addicted forms. Plenty of reviews will tell you it examines the role of faith, family and society in the context of the 70’s and 80’s drug culture. To this day, at least 3 months since I read it, I’m still not sure what the book was about. This book left me thoroughly puzzled – feeling manipulated with no understanding of the writers point, angry that such nonsense could be critically acclaimed and wondering what a ‘good’ book really is. It conveys little with clarity but rather lays the futility of human intentions and actions bare for our interpretation and judgement. Rambling, twisted, inconsequential, and chronologically confused, yet occasionally touching and insightful. Critically acclaimed, it was made into a movie of the same name in 1999.Īs a collection of linked short stories, Jesus’ Son resembles the structure and storyline of a novel assembled in a fashion to fit its drug fueled narrator. Jesus’ Son by Dennis Johnson was first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1992.

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