SOURCE: McManus, James. “The Road from Detox.” New York Times Book Review 97, no. 12 (27 December 1992): 5.

In the following favorable assessment, McManus provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Jesus' Son.

Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son is his fifth book of fiction, the previous four being novels with similar preoccupations: loveless promiscuity, the abuse of narcotics and alcohol, the debilitating effects of parental neglect and the sometimes violent paradoxes inherent in the Christian notions of salvation and self-sacrifice. His prose, especially in this book and in the novels Angels and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, consistently generates imagery of ferocious intensity, much of it shaded with a menacing, even deranged sense of humor. No American novelist since William Burroughs has so flagrantly risked “insensitivity” in an effort to depict the pathology of addiction.

In nearly every respect Jesus' Son can be more accurately described as a novel than as a collection...