SOURCE: Grimson, Todd. “Don't Wake Him Up—He's Writing.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (28 February 1993): 3, 7.

In the following laudatory assessment, Grimson regards Jesus' Son as Johnson's “most accessible and accomplished book, from start to finish, without a single sentence that misses the mark.”

Denis Johnson writes as though he inhabits a waking dream. There is that wonderful sense of someone walking around in his own unconscious—you don't want to wake him up. There's plenty of knowledge of the outside world, he knows very well what's going on out here, but his intelligence, at its deepest, may be an animal intelligence. That is, an intelligence that feels, that intuits, that apprehends immediately without having to think. He is inspired, in the truest sense of that once-potent, even dangerous word.

Jesus' Son is Johnson's fifth book of fiction. Technically, it's a book of short stories, but the stories all...