The Sons of Jesus’ Son: Recent Books from Michael Deagler and Nick Rees Gardner Channel the Spirit of Denis Johnson
When most people talk about Denis Johnson, they’re talking about Jesus’ Son. More often than not, they’re talking about “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” the mesmerizing and death-defying opener of that book. These people—usually writers, who usually subscribe to the theory that great stories are collections of taut, revelatory sentences—will usually point to that final line, the one that turns the story from a confession to an accusation: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”
It’s a great standalone line, but it’s also a perfect introduction to Jesus’ Son, a collection of interlinked stories about Fuckhead, an addict trying to find salvation in America’s rusted heart. He’s amazed that you’re expecting a moral, that you’d expect much of anything from the ten stories that follow.
Of course, that’s the joke. Jesus’ Son offers so much to its readers, especially if they’re writers. When I first read the book on my breaks at a shitty summer job in college, I was bewildered. Johnson had defied so many of the rules I’d learned in the previous semester’s Intro to Creative Writing course—the stories lacked clear arcs, for one thing, sometimes taunting rather than resolving—yet I couldn’t stop reading, trying to trace his moves so I could use them myself. It’s nearly 15 years later, and I’m still trying.
In the three decades since its publication, Jesus’ Son has not only become a classic text, it’s become shorthand. If a writer is compared to Johnson, it means they’ve cut their sentences to the bone without sacrificing their poetry. If a book is compared to Jesus’ Son, it means the work authentically captures the harrowing world of addiction.
I was drawn to two recent books, Michael Deagler’s Early Sobrieties (Astra House) and Nick Rees Gardner’s Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts (Madrona Books), specifically because of that shorthand. Deagler’s novel, which follows a former drunk couchsurfing through South Philadelphia, is described by its publisher as “a sober, millennial Jesus’ Son,” while Gardner’s back cover blurbs feature not one but two mentions of Johnson.
The comparisons make sense. Both Early Sobrieties and Delinquents follow the loose structure of Jesus’ Son—a form Johnson called “twisted”—by focusing less on overarching narratives and more on vivid moments. Both books also feature fast-paced shit talkers who possess Johnson-esque names like the Dogman and Dunk. “Clean for seven years at that point except the occasional drink,” one of Gardner’s characters thinks to himself after nobly refusing a vape. “If you’re not drinking, that means I’m drinking by myself. Which is a warning sign of alcoholism,” one character tells Deagler’s narrator, Dennis Monk. “So think about the danger you’re putting me in.”
The landscapes of Early Sobrieties and Delinquents are also reminiscent of Jesus’ Son, even though Deagler’s Philadelphia and Gardner’s Ohio are hundreds of miles from Johnson’s rural northwest. Still, all of them are populated with the decay of post-industrialism. For Johnson, that meant crumbling bars, abandoned houses, and a dangerous feeling of infinite possibility. "[Fuckhead] lives in a random world,” Johnson told The New York Times in 1992, “a certain part of America where wildness is actually expressed rather than depicted.” Early Sobrieties and Delinquents both possess an important millennial tweak: Deagler’s and Gardner’s post-industrial cities are still struggling, but their wildness has been tamped down by pop-up beer gardens, natural wine bars, and other signs of creeping gentrification.
As I made my way further into these books, I saw other signs of the gap between Johnson’s time and our own. In 1992, Johnson’s book was praised for being “blunt and gritty” and “bludgeoning us with existential reality.” This was the era of D.A.R.E. and “Just Say No,” a time when addiction was still largely considered a moral failing. That sentiment can, unfortunately, still be found throughout the country, but the way we talk about addiction on a national scale has noticeably shifted in the last decade—it’s a public health issue, not a moral one. Arguing otherwise would ignore the facts: in 1992, overdose deaths were around 6,000, while they were just under 108,000 in 2022. Whether or not you’ve read Jesus’ Son, by now we’ve all been bludgeoned with existential reality.
Maybe that’s why Deagler’s and Gardner’s books don’t focus on the worst parts of their characters’ journeys. In 2024, readers don’t need fiction to explain the horrors of addiction; most people have already witnessed it in their own lives. Instead, Early Sobrieties and Delinquents are primarily concerned with what comes after rock bottom, or what Gardner calls “the weirdness of recovery.” “Some days I walked the streets of Philadelphia humbled by the inimitable majesty of life, finding every joy and every sorrow experienced by any person that I might meet (or see, or learn of) innate and gloriously accessible to me,” Deagler’s Monk, eight months into his sobriety, explains. “Other days Philadelphia was just Philadelphia, and I was a miser, discerning nothing pitiable in any human being besides his ignorance of my own tribulations.”
Deagler’s and Gardner’s characters stumble through the weirdness, trying to make sense of their survival. In Gardner’s “Spit Backs,” a man compiles 99 hours of footage in an attempt to make the definitive documentary about addiction, “so intent on the idea that folklore holds the opioid epidemic’s answers.” Deagler’s Monk, meanwhile, plans to write a feature on a local singer-songwriter who died of an overdose, despite not having the consent of the family or an editor. “Sobriety was, among other things, self-aggrandizing,” he admits.
I thought back to Nico Walker’s Cherry, another millennial novel that garnered its own Johnson comparisons upon its release. Cherry is, in many ways, the defining book of the opioid epidemic, one that traces the roots of a man’s descent back to his disillusionment with the larger American project. It’s a gripping and sometimes shocking read, no doubt enhanced by Walker’s unrestrained narrative voice and the parallels to his own biography, yet by the final page it’s followed a fairly conventional trajectory. A tragedy, I think they call it.
Deagler and Gardner’s books are quieter, but they’re surprisingly more subversive. I am familiar with the descent; we have no shortage of books and movies and series and podcasts and tell-alls about the horrors of addiction. What these books offered was a story about characters trying to move beyond tragedy but still winding up muddled in the long colossal slop that sits before redemption.
In “Beverly Home,” the final story from Jesus’ Son, Fuckhead assures us that he’s settling into recovery: he’s attending AA meetings, editing a newsletter for a senior living facility, and dating a woman. Despite what Fuckhead would like you to believe, it’s not such a simple conclusion. He mentions that he occasionally hears voices and that he regularly lurks outside the home of a Mennonite couple, watching them have sex through their bedroom window. “I was just learning to live sober, and in fact I was often confused,” he says. You get the sense that this is not the end of his story, but the beginning of a new chapter, one that might be less severe but is still, ultimately, unpredictable. “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them,” he says. “I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.” More than anything else, those lines illuminate what millennial Johnson acolytes like Deagler and Gardner do so effectively. Against all odds, their characters have found that place. Their books ask one simple question: What now?
