SOURCE: Gates, David. “A Family's Darkest Secret: Inside the Domestic Bonds of Love and Brutality.” Newsweek 121, no. 6 (February 1993): 67.

In the following excerpt, Gates offers a positive assessment of Jesus' Son.

In Jesus' Son, Idaho-based Denis Johnson's masterfully bleak sequence of short stories narrated by a young heartland lowlife, brutality is unpredictable and unremarkable: shootings, stabbings, guns held to heads, heroin overdoses, gruesome car wrecks—and confrontations that don't turn violent only because the antagonists can't stay focused. But scarier still is when the narrator betrays his chronic state of hallucinatory befuddlement. “It was a Polish neighborhood somewhere or other,” he tells us at one point in his wanderings. “The Polish neighborhoods have that snow. They have that fruit with the light on it, they have that music you can't find.”

As in Johnson's 1991 novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, everybody's in that shape. His narrator goes to buy...