SOURCE: Smith, Robert McClure. “Addiction and Recovery in Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son.” Critique 42, no. 2 (winter 2001): 180-91.

In the following essay, Smith evaluates the meaning of substance abuse and recovery in Jesus' Son.

Denis Johnson is the poet laureate of the pathology of addiction. His fictional landscape is peopled by lost souls—the sinners, the misfits, the desperate—waiting for a perpetually postponed salvation in a haze of alcohol and heroin.¹ Johnson's distinctive vision finds its most spectacular expression in the short story collection Jesus' Son, eleven interlocked tales narrated by an addictive consciousness simultaneously clouded and yet rendered startlingly lucid by chemical dependency. This poetic fiction has inspired some readers to ecstatic hyperbole: “it seems sometimes as if Rimbaud returned from Abbysinia and spent a few years driving around America, hanging out with the riffraff who ended up in ‘Drugstore Cowboy’” (Grimson 3). The enthusiastic reception of Jesus' Son...