SOURCE: Donnelly, Daria. “Flannery O'Connor in Reverse.” Commonweal 120, no. 14 (13 August 1993): 23-4.

In the following favorable assessment of Jesus' Son, Donnelly determines the influence of Flannery O'Connor's “spiritual vocation for the grotesque” on Johnson's work.

The fantasy: poet-novelist Denis Johnson screeches up to Flannery O'Connor's door in his “Maniac Drifter”-emblazoned sports car; they head off to noon Mass followed by comic, wild, and satisfying conversation. The reality: Denis Johnson has been carrying on an edgy romance with Catholicism and O'Connor ever since the demonic rapist Ned Higher-and-Higher appeared in his first novel, Angels, to upstage in a sense O'Connor's malevolent violet-eyed stranger from The Violent Bear It Away.

Johnson's most recent book, Jesus' Son, owes much to O'Connor's spiritual vocation for the grotesque. The kinds of Catholic images that dominated his fourth novel, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, reemerge here. These sacramental images both hover at the edge...