A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping . . . A Cherokee filled with bourbon . . . A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student . . .
And a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri . . .
Jesus’ Son is probably my favorite short story collection ever. It’s the book I always recommend when trying to get people who don’t read into the idea of reading. First of all, it’s short: 133 pages. It’s also extremely stimulus-dense, dark, funny, and unlike most fiction you read in high school. It’s profane and gross and rude. It jams beautiful stuff up next to hideous stuff. This book might piss you off or gross you out, but it’s not going to bore you.
(That’s going to be a theme with the books I’m talking about in this series, so if you’re into it this might be a good time to mention that you can subscribe and get these suckers in your inbox.)
“Car Crash While Hitchhiking” is the first story in the book. I couldn’t find a free version online but you could get the Kindle version for ten bucks if you want to read it through before continuing. (Which I recommend.) Anyway the story opens with the sequence of descriptions above. From this scattered introduction, we learn a few things about the world of Jesus’ Son.
It’s unfair: The characters who drink and drive don’t crash. It’s the family that crashes, and the man they hit who dies.
It’s sad. Every character described in this intro is screwing up and/or suffering.
It’s a world where all occurrences are assigned a strange, reverent, maybe Biblical import. Note the very weird “killed forever.” Wtf is that?
…a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri . . .
Johnson does something, here and elsewhere, where he buries important information under layers of unimportant information. It doesn’t really matter that the family is from Marshalltown or that the man is driving west out of Bethany, Missouri… we do get a general sense of Midwesternness out of these details, but there’d probably be a more succinct way to convey that.
To me it seems like Johnson does this for a couple reasons:
Maintain conversational tone: This is how people tell stories in real life. They ramble and share information that’s unnecessary. Actually you can learn a lot about somebody via the information they choose to include when telling a story.
Capture sense of reflection/truth-seeking: Many of the stories in Jesus’ Son are presented as characters trying to puzzle out confusing events from their pasts. So if they’re rambling or meandering it’s because they know there’s something meaningful in their memories but they don’t know exactly where it is.
After this intro sequence, the narrator jumps back in time and describes how the family from Marshalltown picked him up.
[…]
The travelling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.
I didn’t care. They said they’d take me all the way.
Look at the information density here! Tons of sensory detail. I also love the alternation in sentence length and complexity.
There’s a lot of writing in the book about what it’s like to be a drug addict. I have not done a lot of drugs personally but from my limited experience it seems like the experience is a lot of amazing sensations simultaneous with (or fading into) terrible sensations.
Hence:
…made the linings of my veins feel scraped out. My jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name.
Like, this sounds awful, but also incredible. Imagine having that level of sensory activation, to perceive each individual raindrop. Blessing/curse etc.
Here we start getting some premonition stuff that will continue throughout the story. (“I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.”) The fact that the narrator thinks he knew what was going to happen and didn’t warn the family makes him seem like a real asshole.
Before telling us what happens with the crash, the narrator goes on a big tangent where he describes driving through Kansas City with the salesman. There’s a bit of dialogue I really like here:
He went on and on about his girlfriend. “I like this girl, I think I love this girl—but I’ve got two kids and a wife, and there’s certain obligations there. And on top of everything else, I love my wife. I’m gifted with love. I love my kids. I love all my relatives.” As he kept on, I felt jilted and sad: “I have a boat, a little sixteen-footer. I have two cars. There’s room in the back yard for a swimming pool.” He found his girlfriend at work. She ran a furniture store, and I lost him there.
This rules man. Normally it’s conventional writing wisdom that you don’t want to write stuff like “I felt sad” because it’s boring and non-specific. It definitely works here though, maybe because it’s revealing that all the talk of love makes the narrator sad.
Also what amazing characterization of the salesman. He sounds like a real asshole but also sort of understandable maybe? He’s not a deadbeat like the narrator but he’s still an addict and he’s still miserable despite all his wealth.
Sometimes somebody says a thing and the way they say it conveys that the opposite is true. This is part of “S U B T E X T” which imo is the most important part of good dialogue. As a reader it is very rewarding to figure out information that goes beyond what the characters are explicitly saying. Here I guess the fact that the guy talks so much about love makes it seem like he doesn’t actually have much love in his life at all. And the fact that he brags about his possessions so much makes it sound like he isn’t actually content with his possessions at all.
This is verging on “too long.” I hope you’ll read the story and let me know what you think lol. Without spoiling anything I’ll call out some other moments that I really enjoyed/found inspiring:
The description of the crash itself and the dialogue that follows. It’s sad, absurd, and darkly funny.
After the crash, the narrator is wandering around with the baby who was in the back seat with him (the baby is miraculously unharmed). I love the sequence w/ the trucker who arrives at the scene. There’s a great “one-two punch” that characterizes both of them really well: “By his manner he seemed to endorse the idea of not doing anything about this. I was relieved and tearful.” Deadbeats, man.
This section: “Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn’t know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”
WTF that last quote. Honestly I think it’s a perfect paragraph. Again it’s a mixture of extremely potent information and some rambling ‘unnecessary’ stuff like “…at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door…” — and the narrator’s unexpected reaction is… disgusting, in a beautiful way? IDK. He’s clearly a fucked up guy. The fact that we as readers are deriving pleasure from this sequence makes us sort of fucked up too, though, right?
The ending of this story, where it falls apart into a gorgeous hallucination, is incredible and I think about it all the time.
Next post I’m going to write about the stories “Two Men” and “Dundun” and the neato plot and dialogue work in those. OK here’s another subscription button. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate that!
“Killed forever” ...In Bethany but no raising of Lazarus it seems...