With dialogue that feels like you're getting it verbatim and stripped-down prose, he writes simple, honest stories that have the bigness of great work. This is the kind of thing that could be done.
I was living in Iowa City at the time, and this book, for my friends and me, became sort of a young writers' bible. And I read on and on, and thought, This guy is that good. When I started it, I knew: This is that guy. And then, in the way good reading makes you feel like your connection to it was fated, I soon ended up with a copy of the book in my hands. So I read what I thought was called "Car Crash," and loved it and was moved by it. Someone - I can't remember who, and don't remember when - gave me a Xeroxed copy of the first story, "Car Crash While Hitchhiking." If you look at the book, you'll see the author's name is absent from the margins, and not even the whole title of the story is there. Johnson doesn't romanticize, doesn't mean I can't: because I came to these stories in the most wonderful way. He doesn't ever romanticize these dark settings while leaving his narrator open to the fact that, despite it all, we may live in a heartbreakingly romantic world. Johnson succeeds at this where so many others fail. It's set in a down-and-out world of drugs and drink. And it is brutally honest and painfully beautiful. But I can never get enough of Jesus' Son. There are so few books that I go back to again and again, and fewer still that were written in the last 20 years. If you're only going to read one book this year about getting stabbed in the eye and crushing tiny, helpless bunnies, then I'd run right out and get Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son.
He currently spends his days drinking coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in New York City. Nathan Englander is the author of the just-published novel The Ministry of Special Cases and the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
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