Posthumous story collection suffused with life and abandon
Five tales a thrilling addition to late writer’s canon, stunning reminder of what we have lost
When he died last May, Denis Johnson was in the front rank of American writers, with a critically heralded canon and at least three books — Tree of Smoke, a sprawling novel which won the National Book Award and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize; Train Dreams, an epic history of the American West in the form of a novella barely a hundred pages long; and Jesus’ Son, a wild, chaotic collection of linked short stories steeped in drugs and visions — which are recognized as modern classics.
To that trio of acknowledged masterworks we should add The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Johnson’s second collection of short stories. While the collection is slim — five stories, just over 200 pages — it is a thrilling addition to the Johnson canon, and a stunning reminder of what we have lost.
The stories in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden are characteristic of Johnson’s approach, seemingly chaotic (sometimes to the point of absurdity) but tightly controlled. The language of each story is a deceptively precise rendering of the vernacular appropriate to each character — whether an aging ad man or a young man in jail — lending a rough realism and immediacy while simultaneously revealing greater depths. The events of the stories veer between hilarity and significance, suffused with life and abandon, but laced with loss and disillusion, delusion on the road to meaning.
In “Doppelganger, Poltergeist,” for ex- ample, a poet whose older brother has died develops an obsession with Elvis Presley’s relationship with his own brother, the stillborn Jessie Presley. Lest one think the story is merely a psychological study, it also includes grave-robbing, conspiracy theories, a witch, an awkward publishing party and the events of Sept.11, from the streets of lower Manhattan. Similarly, “The Starlight on Idaho” begins as a therapeutic exercise, a series of letters from a young man in a treatment centre (the aforementioned Starlight), which quickly become a search for meaning and a series of cries against the universe, to such recipients as his brother, the first girl he liked, Rolling Stone magazine, Pope John Paul and, well, Satan.
The heart of the book, in the shadow of Johnson’s death, is “Triumph Over the Grave,” a story about writing and death, about a writer reckoning with the passing of those around him, his world growing smaller and more proscribed by the day. Slipping easily back and forth through time, the story is a marvel, plain-spoken but powerful, shot through with the hard truths for which Johnson was so wellknown. “The world keeps turning,” Johnson writes. “It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.”
The stories are characteristic of Johnson’s approach, seemingly chaotic but tightly controlled