SOURCE: Birkerts, Sven. Review of Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson. Boston Review 18, no. 5 (October–November 1993): 30.

In the following review of Jesus' Son, Birkerts compares the prose styles of Denis Johnson, Thom Jones, and Raymond Carver.

Prose styles, like hemlines, serve as an obscure barometer of changes in the cultural life. A barometer because they are in some way linked to the large atmosphere (the Zeitgeist), and obscure because no one can quite determine how. We've come a long way since the days when Hemingway's clipped diction was universally understood as representing a generation's retraction of soul before the violence of history. Literary styles are now many and various, pitched to coterie audiences. Writers tend to work in the vein of: in the vein of Toni Morrison or Thomas Pynchon or Ann Beattie or Douglas Coupland. …

If we still have anything like a dominant contemporary mode it is probably...