The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

Starred review from September 4, 2017
The second story collection from the late Johnson (Jesus' Son) is a masterpiece of deep humanity and astonishing prose. The title story chronicles a lifetime of moments, from the small to the ecstatic, of ad agent Bill Whitman, including a chance bathroom encounter, his marriage ("Have I loved my wife? We've gotten along. We've never felt like congratulating ourselves"), and his searching walks around his neighborhood at night ("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"). "The Starlight on Idaho" is structured as a series of letters written by Mark Cassandra, an alcoholic in a recovery center, to all the significant people in his life—siblings, doctors, Satan—as he considers how he can correct his tendency toward self-destruction ("I have been asked over and over by medical people who probably know what they're talking about ‘Why aren't you dead?'"). In "Strangler Bob," a young man named Dink ends up in county lockup, where he meets a group of other wayward men, eats a hot rod magazine soaked in an unspecified hallucinogen, and mulls over what would happen if an ominous red button on the wall were to be pressed. "Triumph Over the Grave" is a winding story told by an aging writer about his deceased friends and acquaintances, including a novelist who sees the ghosts of his brother and sister-in-law on his Texas ranch. In "Doppelgänger, Poltergeist," a poetry professor's long friendship with one of his students draws him into the student's obsession with an Elvis conspiracy. This book is an instant classic. It's filled with Johnson's unparalleled ability to inject humor, profundity, and beauty—often all three—into the dark and the mundane alike. These characters have been pushed toward the edge; through their searches for meaning or clawing just to hold onto life, Johnson is able to articulate what it means to be alive, and to have hope. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc.

October 15, 2017
A posthumous collection of stories from Johnson (The Laughing Monsters, 2014), graceful and death-stalked as his work ever was. Johnson (1949-2017) is best known for his writing about hard-luck cases--alcoholics, thieves, world-weary soldiers. But this final collection ranges up and down the class ladder; for Johnson, a sense of mortality and a struggle to make sense of our lives knew no demographic boundaries. In the title story, a successful adman nearing retirement offers a series of portraits of dead and disappeared acquaintances to reckon with questions of art, life, and integrity. "Strangler Bob" is a criminal's account of life in a county jail that's carried by its seriocomic tone (one fellow inmate recalls his wife and how "I sort of killed her a little bit") until its knockout closing becomes prophetically biblical. Johnson had a great knack for finding and keeping a story's narrative spine while writing about lives that are wildly swerving, a sensibility displayed at its best in "The Starlight on Idaho," about a recovering alcoholic writing a series of letters that reveal his mercurial character and accidental poetry. ("I've got about a dozen hooks in my heart, I'm following the lines back to where they go.") The two closing stories deal with writers whose brilliance and success haven't guaranteed happiness: a poet in "Doppelganger, Poltergeist" cultivates a mad and expensive conspiracy theory about Elvis Presley's death, while an aging, ill writer in "Triumph Over the Grave" lives alone and is prone to hallucinations. Whether it's a motivation to clean up or (more often) a prompt to think about the past, death is always Topic A for these characters. "It's plain to you that at the time I write this, I'm not dead," one narrator tells us. "But maybe by the time you read it." American literature suffered a serious loss with Johnson's death. These final stories underscore what we'll miss.

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Starred review from March 5, 2018
An outstanding assemblage of actors narrates this powerful collection of five short stories from the late Johnson, who died in 2017. Film actor Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, Nocturnal Animals) soulfully relays “The Starlight on Idaho,” which unfolds in a series of letters to friends and family, written by a character named Mark “Cass” Cassandra from inside a rehab facility where he is trying, once again, to get clean. Shannon’s delivery fully embraces the highs and lows of Cass’s missives, which are at times as funny as they are tragic. “Triumph over the Grave” is written from the perspective of an elderly writer who ponders his mortality while reflecting on the deaths of his friends. Voice actor Will Patton reads this story in a Southern accent. He sounds both reflective and wise, and his slow pacing gives the impression that the speaker is a man who chooses his words carefully. The story ends with a chilling passage that Patton transforms into a emotionally raw soliloquy. While Patton and Shannon provide the most noteworthy performances, the other stories, which are read by celebrity narrators Nick Offerman, Dermot Mulroney, and Liev Schreiber, are also excellent. These exceptional stories are expertly rendered, both in the writing and the reading, and are a fitting finale to Johnson’s career. A Random House hardcover.

Starred review from December 1, 2017
A magnet for weirdness, the narrator in the episodic and mesmerizing title story in this percussive collection asks if, like him, you collect and squirrel away in your soul certain odd moments when the Mystery winks at you. This well describes Johnson's modus operandi throughout this posthumously published gathering of psychologically revelatory, spiritually inquisitive, and grimly funny stories about the derailed and the deranged. National Book Award-winner Johnson's death at age 67 in May 2017 makes his portraits of characters suffering from mental imbalance and addiction, and those trying to care for them, all the more resonant; so, too, his fascination with fairy tales, which infuses his edgy dramas, including one set in a rehab center, another in jail, with timelessness and universality. No matter how lunatic and chaotic the mindscapes and goings-on become, Johnson's language remains knifing in its clarity. Triumph over the Grave, a magnificently unnerving story in which a revered writer comes to a sad end, concludes presciently with the narrator observing, It's plain to you that at the time I write this, I'm not dead. But maybe by the time you read it. Johnson will be remembered and revered as an incisive storyteller fluent in the comedy and tragedy of human confusion and the transcendence of compassion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2017

A National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist claiming the respect of both critics and dedicated readers, Johnson died in May 2017, and we are fortunate that this collection was already in the works. It comes a quarter century after Jesus' Son, among his best-known titles, and not unexpectedly explores issues of aging, mortality, and the search for meaning.

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