THE LARGESSE OF THE SEA MAIDEN

Jonathan Cape, 224pp, £14.99, Oldie price £10.21 inc p&p

The name of Denis Johnson won’t be instantly familiar to many British readers – but the American author, who died last year aged 67, has a large and devoted following in the United States. The posthumously published

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is his second volume of short stories, and James Lasdun filled in some of the background to Johnson in the

Guardian: ‘Like David Foster Wallace before him, he had a combination of obsessions and personal experience that positioned him to tackle what has arguably become the representative tragedy of life today in the US, namely the drama of addiction and rehab. For where else are the culture’s destructive passions, dysfunctional politics and disconcerting faith in miracles present in such concentrated form?’ And as Christian Lorentzen wrote in Vulture, ‘Sometimes the biographical fallacy isn’t a fallacy, and we know that Johnson spent a lot of his twenties in a haze of alcohol, heroin, and whatever else came his way.’

Johnson’s characters, wrote Lorentzen, ‘live and die on the lonely fringes, on highways and in hospitals, in bars or behind bars, scavengers and hermits in the swirl outside the zone of American normalcy’. In the

New York Times, Dwight Garner thought the prose ‘vernacular and elevated at the same time. One can say about this book what one narrator says about the poems of a writer he loves: “They were the real thing, line after line of the real thing.”’ And in the Spectator, John Burnside hailed ‘one of the best short-story writers of his generation’ by quoting from one of Johnson’s poems: the prayer that everything is praying: the summer evening a held bubble, every gesture riveting the love, the swaying of waitresses, the eleven television

sets in a storefront broadcasting a murderer’s face —

these things speak the clear promise of Heaven.