Johnson’s legacy of grace evident in new collection

Denis Johnson, who died last year, gave us a dozen works of distinctive and inimitable works of fiction. Of these, he is best known for two: “Tree of Smoke,” his 2007 novel about Vietnam and the CIA, for which he won the National Book Award, and “Jesus’ Son,” a collection of short stories published in 1992. “Jesus’ Son,” which contains multiple interlocking stories of drug addicts and their associates, included the phantasmagoric “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” a classic of the American short story form. (If you have read that story, you’ll remember it. If you haven’t, you should.) Like much of Johnson’s work, the book displayed a deep fascination with the flamboyant desperation of society’s rogues, people unable or unwilling to conform to contemporary America’s overly narrow and spiritually hollow vision of the good life.

Johnson’s beautiful new book of stories, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” is in certain respects a successor to “Jesus’ Son.” Its characters, too, tend to be nonconformists driven to desperation. At times — in “Strangler Bob” and particularly in “The Starlight on Idaho” — the desperation overwhelms the stories, choking the life somewhat out of the characters. “Strangler Bob” is a prison story with a colorful cast of characters; “The Starlight on Idaho” is the first-person account of a man trying to escape his addictions and rise up from his sad existence. Neither story is entirely satisfying, though each has its moments.

The other three stories, though, are remarkable. “Triumph Over the Grave” is a reflection on mortality, in which a writer reflects on the lives and, more particularly, the deaths of people he has known. Here, and also in the title story, Johnson’s narration moves unpredictably (but never haphazardly) between various plotlines that are united not by conventional standards of causation and chronology but by theme and dream logic. In addition to being a fiction writer, Johnson was also a poet, and he has the poet’s gift for finding the perfect image to encapsulate an idea or experience.

The title story, which offers the recollections of an aging advertising man whose attitude toward his experiences consists of a mix of befuddlement and enchantment, is less deathhaunted than “Triumph Over the Grave” but displays a similar roving, associative narrative movement. It begins with a bizarre and unforgettable scene between a young woman and a veteran of the conflict in Afghanistan, a profound and uncomfortable encounter that leads to unexpected consequences. “You and I know what goes on,” the narrator says to us, conspiratorially, making us wonder to what extent, really, we do. Later, he pauses to address us again: “I wonder if you’re like me, if you collect and squirrel away in your soul certain odd moments when the Mystery winks at you.” Both “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden” and “Triumph Over the Grave” are, in essence, collections of such moments, gestures toward the deepest mysteries of our existence on this planet.

The closing story, “Doppelganger, Poltergeist,” is more unified and conventional in its structure, but is at its heart equally enigmatic. It is the story of Mark Ahearn, as related by his teacher, who narrates the story and who calls him “our country’s finest poet.” Ahearn’s primary preoccupation, though, is not his literary career, but his obsession with Elvis Presley and his lifelong attempt to establish his bizarre theory that the real Elvis was murdered by his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and replaced by Jesse Garon Presley — Elvis’ identical twin, who, according to the official records, was stillborn.

The word isn’t much used anymore. But it’s a perfect word to describe Johnson’s fiction, which overflows with creative energy, moving from one beauty to another with a mercurial, at times almost chaotic grace. Although his characters are often diminished and winnowed by their struggles with life, the narrative voice that describes their travails gives evidence of an imagination that is nearly boundless in its generosity and abundance.