As indifferent to other people’s lives as they are careless of their own, they aimlessly wander the blank American landscape wedded to bad luck and grasping after worse luck as if it were their last hope on earth. Two hundred years later - the book is set in the 1970s - Johnson’s drug-addled characters discover an equal but opposite sublimity in submission to the self-destructive dictates of anomie. Addison’s enlightenment era’s vision of the moral sublimity of a man who willingly submits to the law in preference to the preservation of his own life inspired, among others, our own Founding Fathers. This is a fragmented modernist novel whose deliberately misleading subtitle, Stories, is just the first of its sly tricks: the parts are even more devoid of unity or conclusion than the whole. “I must approve the sentence that destroys me.” Somewhat incongruously, this line from Joseph Addison’s eighteenth-century smash Cato came to mind as I was reading, 24 years behind schedule, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.
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