Jesus on the Mainline

In Jesus’ Son, perhaps Johnson’s most representative work, Johnson portrays the story of his narrator’s search for religious transcendence through a creative engagement with Lou Reed’s great song about drug addiction and spiritual yearning, “Heroin.” The title of the book is in fact a coded reference to Reed’s “Heroin” (mentioned in the epigraph) and to the narrator’s search to become worthy of Jesus Christ’s legacy. Lou Reed, though, is the novel’s authorizing voice, or spirit of the novel. Johnson writes a kind of confessional novel—the story of his birth of an artist that also refers to his status as a born-again Christian. In using Reed’s “Heroin” to structure his fictional autobiography, Johnson acknowledges that Lou Reed helped give him the vision to render a horrid world true and beautiful, something worth saving.

Английский

Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. – 2004. – Vol. 7, № 1. – P. 3.