He'd often ask me to his weekend saturnalias, to which he would invite bohemian literary types and multihued ladies of the night, and at which I never felt quite bacchic enough. That's why he'd chosen to live there: to be near the sodden spirit of a writer who'd doomed himself to affliction. Below me lived an Indian American intellectual with hipster-literary-narcotic tendencies and more friends than George Clooney, and he knew all about Yates and Crossroads. While reading A Tragic Honesty (Picador, 2003), Blake Bailey's biography of Richard Yates, I discovered that Crossroads was the smoky womb into which Yates retreated, every day for eleven years, to blitzkrieg his liver and lungs.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.īoth comments and pings are currently closed.In 2005 I lived on the corner of Beacon Street and Massachusetts Avenue, right at the frenetic hub of Boston, two floors above the Crossroads Irish Pub. On Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 2:13 pm and is filed under 2008 Books. If you like the short story form, these charted new territory when they were collected in 1992, and still resonate today. The stories and book are brief, but powerful. The writing is beautiful, while also conveying both the horror and kaleidoscopic nature of addiction. The unnamed main character is addicted to heroin and alcohol, and stumbles through bars, rehab, relationships, jobs and crime. This passage, about riding the train in the city, described how I felt as I read the linked stories–along for a whiplash ride. I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a– wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head–tunnel) actually lived. I thought ToS was quite good, so I was intrigued to see what Jesus’ Son would yield. Several judges preferred it to Johnson’s more recent book, Tree of Smoke. Denis Johnson’s short story collection, Jesus’ Son, got on my radar during The Morning News’ Tournament of Books.

Jesus son denis