This collection of short stories is pretty much the perfect length for a collection: eleven taut stories, all of them screaming silently about the state of the fucking nation. The nation being the USA, the date any time you’ve been lost in the great wilderness of backwaters USA. Even if only in a figurative sense. There’s something so remarkably homely about these tales of drifters and petty criminals, losers the lot of them, just trying to find a way to get by in the maw of a cruel world. Johnson bestows the gift of poetry on these poor souls, as though he wants to redeem them and himself through the power of the broken word. The penultimate story is nothing more than a conversation with a man about being shot by both his wives, as the narrator shaves his moustache and says he’s going to immortalise him in print. Which, in a way, he has done. You can understand why this collection in particular, with its nod to the Velvets, has acquired a cult status. Maybe it’s just those of us who grew up in the Anglo-Saxon world, but all of these characters have an innate affinity with the flotsam and jetsam of the great capitalist mother hen. From William Carlos Williams to Bukowski, from Huckleberry Finn to Slothrop, there’s a dance to be had through the badlands of the North American psyche and in this collection Johnson joins the dance with the cruel verve of a Lou Reed monologue and the wit of Cale guitar riff. It’s not going to kill you to read this, and it might just make you exhale with relief that you have landed on the right side of the various tracks, in this life, at least.
ps - for long term readers, the following is of note: Johnson is quoted as saying that Jesus’ Son is "a rip-off of Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry"
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