SOURCE: Wiggins, Marianne. “Talk into My Bullet Hole.” Nation 256, no. 6 (15 February 1993): 208-09.

In the following positive assessment of Jesus' Son, Wiggins asserts that reading Johnson's stories “is like living inside someone else's beautifully controlled nightmare.”

In his 1980 Nobel Laureate speech, Czeslaw Milosz cautioned writers that it is not enough to denounce those who would align themselves with misanthropes and tyrants, but that we must broadcast the names of those from whom we have learned, in whom we have trusted and about whom we are reverent, whether as teachers and practitioners of art or as acquaintances through life.

Milosz's larger canvas, of course, in making this remark, was his attempt to paint a map from memory about how memory must work, and about how we, as humans and as writers, must force our memories into existence; how we must not allow the work of writers who have touched upon...