Cold Blooded Old Times
On Denis Johnson's "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden"
The runaway success of the 2025 film Train Dreams (as much as any Netflix movie can really be a success) brought about something of a Denis Johnson renaissance, but not enough of a renaissance for my taste. Sure, sales of Train Dreams blossomed (along with the Vineland/One Battle After Another pairing; a funny pair of books to see on new and notable bookstore tables after so many years of backlist ignominy), but I want more, damnit! I should look up on the subway and see people reading Jesus’s Son and Angels, spot people hauling Tree of Smoke to the park and on vacations like they did Lonesome Dove, and the most obscure litbros out there should be caping for Fiskadoro and The Stars at Noon. It ought to be Denis Johnson June by now! Johnson July too while we’re at it! Angels August! The summer of Denis Johnson beckons.
Not to toot my own horn, but I was a year ahead of the Lonesome Dove resurgence, so consider this my effort to eventually get Denis Johnson back in the spotlight, and not just for some paltry hopecore Netflix adaptation. Every American, on this ominous 250th anniversary, should be issued a Denis Johnson book and sent on their way, because there are few American writers of the past 40 years or so who can match his mix of vernacular mastery and careening possibility. I’ve had Johnson’s last book — 2018’s posthumously published story collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden — sitting on my shelf for years, and only now have gotten around to it, maybe out of a long sadness over his death, so I’m equally a part of the problem, but it’s better late than never. As a bookend to 1992’s Jesus’s Son — without a doubt the most influential American story collection of its era, oft taught, oft imitated, never quite matched — The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is a moving coda, that earlier collection’s hard edges (almost) smoothed down. As its own kind of career capstone — Johnson finished the two unpublished stories in the collection not long before his death — it’s a beautiful swan song, a retrospective on a confused world that doesn’t get any clearer the further along it gets. Absent those wider career concerns, though, it is just a great book of short stories, equal parts wise and funny, full of more good lines than one writer should have in their bag, somehow sentimental without ever getting corny. In short, it’s the good stuff; make it part of your Denis Johnson Summer and you’ll be much better off.
Many of the environs of The Largesse of the Sea Maiden would be familiar to Johnson readers — rehab centers, jails, the generally down-and-out. But the stories also surprisingly cover a more settled-in milieu, older professionals looking back at a life wasted away in another way, in an office, almost unknowingly. Whether writing ads or doing the visiting professor circuit, they have measured out their lives not in coffee spoons but instead those thin wooden stirrers they give you in a break room, a quintessentially American transience refracted through a sheen of careerism. Whatever your title, there you are, or so it seems. “The people on my team had gone on to other teams, fancier agencies, higher accomplishments,” the narrator of the title story reflects, and “[a]ll I’d done in better than two decades was to tread forward until I reached the limit of certain assumptions, and step off.” In a funny way these adrift professional narrators become something like Robert Granier from Train Dreams, men (and yes, they are always men) who have made it to the present but never can quite figure out how they fit there. Looking back at the path there doesn’t clear anything up either; the past is just as mired in darkness as the present, and things aren’t clearing up anytime soon. As the very Denis Johnson-ian narrator of “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist” writes: “The Past just left. Its remnants, I claim, are mostly fiction. We’re stranded here with the threadbare patchwork of memory, you with yours, I with mine […].” One narrator’s friend, an outsider artist named Tony, shares an insight with him: “We live in a catastrophic universe — not a universe of gradualism.” After Tony’s death, that narrator thinks: “That one had always gone right past me. Now it sounded ominous, prophetic. Had I missed a message? A warning?” The narrator of “Triumph Over the Grave” (another Johnson stand-in, another writer) looks back:
Bouts of poverty come along, anxiety, shocking debt, but nothing lasts forever. I’ve gone from rags to riches and back again, and more than once. Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie — although it has to be admitted that clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.
The defamiliarization of the present, combined with these stories’ strings of deaths — friends, second or third ex-wives (it’s hard to tell on the phone sometimes), acquaintances, lovers, Elvis’s, the narrators’ own deaths, and, paratextually, Johnson’s own — combine for a mysterious and spiritual feeling, as if one has been brought up to those aerie environs too, with their horrors but also their small moments of grace:
He took me to a small diner off Union Square, where I had a wonderful breakfast among a handful of miscellaneous wanderers like myself, New Yorkers with their large, historic faces, every one of whom, delivered here without an explanation, seemed invaluable.
But it sells the book short to just focus on its seeming perspicacity, burnished by Johnson’s passing; it also has its wild streak, its humor, its capacity to surprise on every page and in every unfolding sentence. When one character is asked what he’s been up to, he simply responds, “Thangdoodlin’.” Well, sometimes you are just thangdoodlin through this world, and Johnson’s antenna is always tuned towards thangdoodlin of all kinds, stupid capers, bad luck turns of fate, life’s rich pageant: "I would count there to be about fifteen or sixteen hooks in my belly with lines heading off into the hands of people I haven’t seen since a long time back, and that’s one of them,” says the recovering narrator of “The Starlight on Idaho.” “But just to catch you up. In the last five years I’ve been arrested about eight times, shot twice, not twice on one occasion, but once on two different occasions, etc etc and I think I got run over once and I don’t even remember it.” Later on in that story he gets a précis of Vegas from group therapy:
In group the other night a guy just like me said, “I Woke up in Vegas sticky, broke and confused” — a perfect description of that place — I’ve never GONE there, just WOKE UP there.
Sticky, broke, and confused; it’s frighteningly easy to wake up like this in a Johnson story, way she goes sometimes. Or maybe you have the particular ill fortune of ending up in jail, bunkmates with a guy named “Strangler Bob.” The narrator of that particular story — “Strangler Bob,” can’t waste that moniker, featuring one of the more Fuckhead-ian narrators, a la Jesus’s Son — only gets 41 days in the slammer, but there is something higher to be wrested out of the experience amongst the rest of the ne’er-do-wells, something that only a Denis Johnson character could see:
While I was kept there I wondered if this place was some kind of intersection for souls. I don’t know what to make of the fact that I’ve seen those same men many times throughout my life, repeatedly in dreams and sometimes in actuality — turning a corner on the street, gazing out the window of a passing train, or leaving a café just at the moment I glance up and recognize them, then disappearing out the door — and it makes me feel each person’s universe is really very small, no bigger than a county jail, a collection of cells in which he encounters the same fellow prisoners over and over.
If this is our lot — each in our own “really very small universe” — then one can only hope to be stuck with the Denis Johnson types, or at least the types that are still reading Denis Johnson. If we get our summer plans together, we might end up with a few more, god willing.
You can get The Largesse of The Sea Maiden at your local bookstore or local library.
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Oh I gotta put this one on the list!