![]() ![]() ![]() This is beautifully displayed, and helps make the whole cohere, at one particular moment. ![]() Although the narrative is fractured, or at least threateningly weakened in places – for example, a character who dies in one story is alive again in the next – our man is not a consciously unreliable narrator: he tries honestly to convey his impressions, but sometimes fails. It also has a consistent sensibility: the telling is clear but confused, as befits a teller who is a recovering alcohol and heroin addict – though at times we’re not quite sure just how recovering he is. The eleven short fictions here have unity of theme, setting and character (all have the same narrator). Jesus’ Son (1992) has perhaps as much claim to be a novel as a collection of stories. This, his only short story collection, is unfathomably out of print in the UK. Before Denis Johnson became the Don DeLillo of the noughties (I’m thinking of his unfinishable fat novel Tree of Smoke), he was, apparently, a poet and a short story writer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |