Jesus’ Son

"This is the other inescapably influential collection I was referring to earlier. If you talk to contemporary American writers, this is one of the collections that will keep coming up as something that everybody has read and almost everybody has admired. What I love about Denis’s fiction, particularly Jesus’ Son , is the way it’s populated by people who are marginal by almost any measurable standard. His characters are like truants from life. They keep exposing themselves and we find their psychological nakedness both affecting and appalling. We can’t believe that a human being is this un-self-aware or this self-destructive. I love the way his characters, particularly in Jesus’ Son, are always caught between the person they wish they could be and the person they know they are. He has a spectacular gift for de-familiarising our world through his characters’ heightened perceptions. The poet Stephen Dobyns once said his language is like “a man on tall stilts strapped to roller skates on the slippery dance floor of an ocean liner ploughing through typhoon-ridden seas”. It’s been called both. I think it’s neither fish nor fowl. As a novel, it’s quite episodic and feels suspiciously like a bunch of stories. As a group of stories, it’s the same basic set of characters, so in that sense it feels like a novel. Ultimately, I call it a set of linked stories because at least two of the episodes within the 11 could stand independently as masterpieces of the short story form. Novels, short stories and poems are very much part of the same form. The writer goes into a room accompanied only by their imagination and comes out with something. The reader then does the same thing. Plays seem to me somewhat different in that they’re inevitably collaborative. So you’re writing something that’s meant to activate the imaginations of a number of other people, who then transform what you’ve written by performing it. I don’t think that what’s actually on a page in a David Mamet play is remotely the same as seeing a David Mamet play produced."