Jesus' Son.

The fantasy: poet-novelist Denis Johnson screeches up to Flannery O'Connor's door in his "Maniac Drifter"-emblazoned sports car; they head off to noon Mass followed by comic, wild, and satisfying conversation. The reality: Denis Johnson has been carrying on an edgy romance with Catholicism and O'Connor ever since the demonic rapist Ned Higher-and-Higher appeared in his first novel, Angels, to upstage in a sense O'Connor's malevolent violet-eyed stranger from The Violent Bear It Away.

Johnson's most recent book, Jesus' Son, owes much to O'Connor's spiritual vocation for the grotesque. The kinds of Catholic images that dominated his fourth novel, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, reemerge here. These sacramental images both hover at the edge of the parodic and are genuinely moving, as when rosary-clutching prolife demonstrators in one story anoint the narrator with holy water as he emerges from an abortion clinic fleeing "the canceled life dreaming after" him: "and I didn't feel a thing. Not for many years."

Johnson is an unsparing, comic, and spiritual writer who has long been chronicling the drifters, desperate, addicts, and survivors of America. Jesus' Son, billed as a collection of short stories, is a series of eleven hallucinatory episodes, or stations of the cross (as James McManus called them in the New York Times Book Review), narrated by a heroin addict whom Johnson denominates "Jesus' Son," after rock-poet Lou Reed's song, "Heroin": "When I'm rushing on my run/ And I feel just like Jesus' Son." The book's loosely connected drunkalogue ends with the narrator's fragile recovery among the mad, deformed, and outcast of a rest home.

Where O'Connor writes from certitude, the spiritual energy of Johnson's writing emerges from his incertitude. His doubt is generous and his art values the forgiveness that comes from not knowing the meaning of things. In a rare interview (Ironwood, Spring 1985), Johnson, raised in an agnostic household, talks about how temporality opened up a spiritual life for him. After learning that the paper on which his poems were printed would last 600 years, Johnson began to think about the future audience understanding and forgiving his characters in a way he could not. That distant audience increasingly became identified with God: "this perception became a real blessing for me" that "we are being looked down on, and understood, and forgiven even though we may fail."

The power and strangeness of Johnson's storytelling stem from his confidence that the world is saturated with inexplicable meanings that are understood and judged outside this world: "What appears to be is actually happening. This is the real world, and very likely all there is, but it has tremendous meaning." Johnson neither professes to know nor, in his fiction, desires to sort out those meanings; it is this passive hopefulness that makes the writing both disturbing and consoling.

Johnson's narrator reflects his stance. Gifted at seeing into the future, the narrator can do nothing to change what he sees coming. At times his addiction seems symptomatic of his inability to care, at other times the necessary antidote to the pain caused by his perception. Johnson won't let us decide whether this narrator is a brutal drifter and indifferent chronicler of the violence he keeps surviving--car crashes, knifings, shootings, and overdoses--or whether he is an angel, like those in the movie Wings of Desire, who limits his consciousness in order to alleviate the pain of absolute perception. He is both.

Time is the medium of grace for Johnson and the temporality of his narrative is fluid. The narrator feels a car crash before it happens, feels the holy water years later. He never tells a linear tale. His companion Jack Hotel dies of an overdose in one story and appears alive, smoking heroin, in the next. This hallucinatory quality is both offset and sharpened by precise and weirdly comic descriptions and dialogues, as when the narrator's hospital roommate, shot in the face by his wife, instructs him: "Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine."

Johnson, a former heroin and alcohol addict, deftly conveys both the sharpening effects of drugs and the dreamy lassitude they produce. As he brings his narrator into a shaky recovery, Johnson suggests that sobriety renders the world less spectacular (the narrator no longer sees angels or hears cotton balls talk) and more accommodating to reflection. This shift toward grasping the magnificence of the ordinary comes in the final story, "Beverly Home," when the narrator, standing outside the window of a Mennonite woman he has been peeping at for weeks, witnesses the extraordinary but unspectacular act of her husband's remorse and her forgiveness expressed in the washing of her feet. Johnson brilliantly combines the narrator's peeping Tom pleasure watching her undressing her feet with his deep awe for this revelation of love. These stories are powerful because Johnson is true to the narrator's multiple desires, his lust as well as his thirst for meaning and for love.

William Blake famously said that Milton was of the devil's party without knowing it; novelist John Hawkes repeated the charge to an outraged Flannery O'Connor. With Jesus' Son, Johnson gives us a narrator who is of God's party without knowing it. The "Maniac Drifter" whizzes by O'Connor's Milledgeville, Georgia, with a spiritual longing and narrative power born of hope and doubt.