This woman was quite short, well under five feet, closer, in fact, to four and a half feet tall. It’s powerful stuff in a totally different way from the rest of Jesus’ Son.Īnd that’s quite a trick on Johnson’s part. They’re religious and off to the fringes. They’re, as far as we can tell, decent, law-abiding people. So anyway, if it stylized, what is the desired effect? The deal here is we get another collection of freaks and outsiders. But still, it works so well within the context of the collection. This feels like a self-consciously styled short story.Īs a standalone, it really lacks the deranged energy of the other Jesus’ Son stories. Gone are the meandering string of episodes. He’s settling down, at least on a relative scale. OK, so all of this is to say that “Beverly Home” is a little bit different than its predecessors in the collection. Fuckhead is sad, lonely, mean, selfish, etc. In other words, his narrative voice may be assured, but the character he portrays with that voice is anything but. The combination of that nonchalant narrative authority and the pathetic tales he tells is a remarkable mix. It’s as if every story begins as an answer to your imaginary “And that what happened next?” It doesn’t matter what he’s telling you about, no matter how serious or insignificant, he sells it with a matter-of-fact numbness that is commanding. So much of the power in Jesus’ Son derives from the narrator’s supreme confidence – or is it a total lack of concern? (and isn’t confidence and carelessness the same thing anyway? – in his own writer’s authority. As happy as one could reasonably expect, at least. We come to the end of our week inside the Jesus’ Son collection, and we wrap things up with the final story in the book, “Beverly Home.” Presenting the sober world as simply being a different set of weirdos from the world of drug addicts we got to know earlier in the Jesus’ Son collection
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