by Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992, 176 pages

It begins with a man hitchhiking during a rainstorm. He has already received several rides, including one from a salesman who fed him pills that “made the linings of (his) veins feel scraped out.” But now, sopping wet from the downpour, he holds out little hope of getting picked up.

As the day’s booze, hashish and amphetamines saturate his conscience, however, he begins to experience odd premonitions.

“I sensed everything before it happened,” author Denis Johnson writes. “I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside it I knew we’d have an accident in the storm.

“I didn’t care. They said they’d take me all the way.”

They do, in fact, have a terrible accident on the highway. The narrator manages to rescue a baby, but its father doesn’t make it. Later, at the hospital, the mother learns of her husband’s death and becomes hysterical.

“She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.”

The 11 short stories in “Jesus’ Son” (which takes its name from a line in The Velvet Underground song “Heroin”) follow this unnamed narrator on a series of strange and often depraved misadventures. He’s an aimless drifter who steals and cheats and consumes any drug that falls into his lap. And yet, disgusted by his seedy associates, he clings to some vague semblance of morality. Confused but well meaning, he struggles to make sense of his circumstances.

The stories are quick, easily digestible nuggets, all linked by the narrator and a few other recurring characters, most of them similarly jaded. The protagonist searches for love and meaning in his sordid world, but inevitably stumbles over a variety of self-imposed obstacles. Each story is injected with a dose of dark humor, but teeters on the edge of tragedy, equal parts comedy and squalor.

In “Work,” for example, the narrator and a friend named Wayne earn some money by tearing copper wire out of Wayne’s old house and selling it as scrap. They each make less than 30 dollars and immediately blow most of it at a dive bar. In “Dirty Wedding,” his pregnant on-again, off-again girlfriend Michelle has an abortion, and he bungles his attempt at compassion by asking her, “What did they stick up you?” In “Dundun,” he tries to save a man who’s been shot in the stomach, only to have him die in the backseat of his car. In “Out on Bail,” he and a cohort named Jack Hotel split a bag of heroin and both overdose. The narrator survives, but Jack isn’t so lucky.

Johnson writes in brusque but eloquent sentences, all endowed with a mixture of street-weary wisdom and youthful naivety. There are fleeting moments of beauty and inspiration in the narrator’s blemished existence. In the last couple of stories, he convalesces in a rehab facility and gets a job at a home for the elderly, handicapped and demented. Here, among people who are as warped outwardly as he is inwardly, he finds himself on the path to redemption.

The book is especially effective because we’ve all known someone like this narrator—seriously flawed but undeniably redeemable—who jilts the straight and narrow and is sucked under by the lure of street life.

Some, like the protagonist of these stories, manage to pull themselves out in time. Others, like Jack Hotel, don’t.  

This book of stories put Denis Johnson on the literary map in the 1990s. He has also authored a number of plays, poetry collections and novels, including last year’s “Nobody Move.” His 2007 novel “Tree of Smoke” won the National Book Award.

“Jesus’ Son” was made into a 1999 movie starring Billy Crudup as the narrator and Samantha Morton as Michelle, with a series of cameos from Denis Leary, Jack Black, Dennis Hopper and Holly Hunter.

Johnson, himself, also makes a brief appearance as a guy who strolls into an emergency room with a hunting knife buried in his eye socket.