SOURCE: Miles, Jack. “An Artist of American Violence.” Atlantic 271, no. 6 (June 1993): 121-27.

In the following positive assessment of Jesus' Son, Miles contends that Johnson succeeds in turning American crime and violence into fragmented, poetic prose.

Denis Johnson, who began as a poet, has found a new, poetically charged way to turn American violence into prose fiction. To link his work even loosely with crime fiction, as a few reviewers have done, is to mislead the reader. His work has nothing in common with lurid re-creations of “true crime,” that overgrown bastard child of journalism, and little or nothing in common with the fiction of even the best conventional crime novelists. Johnson's subject is broader than theirs. It is not just crime but American violence, including drug addiction less as a crime than as a self-inflicted wound, and including disturbed sexual and social relations even when they fall short...