Jesus' Son: Stories Denis Johnson
Publisher: Harper Perennial

With the death of her only son, the widow in our story was once again victimized. Where we read ourselves in sometimes relates to the titles we give the stories (cf. Er vloog een duif tegen m'n raam · Hoornse plas, 08:15 · Jesus' Son: Stories by · Juanjuan op de fiets · Vrijheidsplein en Apenrots. They are heading in one direction. Here's how the story goes, Abraham had 2 sons, one through his slave Hagar and one through Sarah. He connects his story to larger universal stories and illustrates these stories with hundreds of edited film clips and projected Integrating hundreds of film clips and photographic images into a theatrical celebration of the Cinematic Savior, it's the tale of two epic heroes on a search for transcendence: Jesus, the Son of God -- Mike, the son of a TV writer. He sits down and for 70 minutes tells a story about his own life. My first contact with Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son was reading “Steady Hands” when it came out in Esquire. And all our stories today have this theme of God and life defeating Sin and Death. Tryout turned out to be the keyword, here. Nonetheless, it brings for me the same sense of discomfort and self-scrutiny that many of Jesus' parables also evoke. In the other direction, at the same time, you have another crowd — the crowd following a widow as she goes to bury her only son. So this guy walks into a dark room. But that all changed when Jesus entered her life and brought her son back to her. JESUS' SON was recommended to me as the perfect tryout book for Johnson's literature. In contrast to so many of the healing stories, the person in need of healing never asks for Jesus' help. We have sons coming back to life. We have widows getting back their places in society. Jesus sees her accompanying the funeral procession and is so moved by the sight that he brings her son back to life. As you know, the story is just a couple of pages of dialogue, almost completely free of the other elements of scene.