'Jesus’ Son' and the Short Story Revival

by Fenella Johnson

Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, a collection of short stories centring around an addict (or several, the stories never stretch to anything as mundane as a name for their narrators) but truly about what happens when a man retreats from the ceremonies of public life to live in a fictional,disjointed  America of their own making, is personal and wise and generous. Any form of cohesive connection between the collection’s stories festers in the corners ; an indication of Johnson’s surreal approach is the collection taking its name from a Lou Reed song.In short - it veers a bit surreal, and a bit druggy. But the insular scavenging nature of the addict is treated with kindness as Johnson never condemns his characters, but presents them fully formed, with their weaknesses and flaws visible and uncommented on. The first story (‘Car Crash while Hitch Hiking’) for example, begins with the ‘midwestern clouds like great gray brains’ and ends with the narrator giving a statement that occurred during the car crash that is interrupted by an officer telling him to ‘ put your cigarette out’. Few writers can flip from the scope of the Midwestern sky to the utter mundane and yet utterly telling with Johnson’s grace or style. Later, he describes ships ‘like paper silhouettes being sucked up by the sun’ ; his gift is centering the minute telling details within these larger surreal images , which leads to a prose perfect for the short story. Because you have to have that specific visual detail, and be able to choose what you want to hint at, and you have to do it in about 3000 words.

Johnson died in 2017, a year where almost 50% more short stories were sold than the previous year,which led naturally to claims that there is a revival in the buying (and writing, I suppose) of the short story collection. Case in point : Cat Person, the New Yorker published short story that went viral for it’s description of modern dating, and also because it was very well written.I thought then, as I read it and used up the last of my six free New Yorker articles for the month, that short stories are actually perfect for the modern age. It has often been remarked that we are busier than ever, more connected than ever - short stories are fiction for the modern age, a tiny fully formed nugget of a literary work, a condensed quick bedtime read. A recent piece by the Guardian entitled ‘ Complete fiction ; why the short story renaissance is a myth’ disregarded the discussion of a revival of short stories, nothing as it did so that the same discussion had occurred in the pages of the New York Times in 2013, and the Telegraph in 2015 and 2016. ( Perhaps the paper neglected to mention they too had run a similar story in 2016?)It made a relevant point that we are always experiencing the rise of some kind of ‘moment… that short stories are prevented from being short stories in the way novels are, generally speaking, allowed to be simply novels’. It is true that there is something almost performative about the short story, a noticeable awkwardness to the writing and reading of them in modern literary discussions. There is a sense that they are often perceived as a stepping stone to the novel - as a form, like poetry collections, they cannot rival the popularity of their bigger sibling. Johnson’s most famous work is probably Train Dreams, a 111 page novella initially published in the Paris Review - what is that, if simply not a elongated short story ?

I think the argument that counters the suggestion of a resurgence of the short story, is that good fiction deserves to be noticed and read. It is annoying to read that there is a revival of the short story, when it has simply never gone away - and a discussion surrounding a revival, or a resurgence, or a renaissance, clouds a discussion about good fiction. Which brings us back to Johnson’s Jesus’s Son and it’s generous,ambitious, vivid prose, and how good it was, and how much I would urge you to read it.