A review by chillcox15
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson

5.0

I was caught off-guard by how much I loved The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, considering I am only faintly appreciative of Jesus' Son and didn't like Train Dreams. Each of the five stories in this book, though, wowed me in many different ways. In the first story and again in the last two stories, Johnson seems to be wrestling with, and wringing humor out of, his aging and status as an achieved member of the literary/academic elite. The title story has some titillating experimentation with collage style narrative. In the second and third stories, The Starlight on Idaho and Strangler Bob, he's dealing with the hard-edged fiction of Jesus' Son, dealing with men in and out of the carceral state, and they were maybe the most aesthetically similar, but I don't hold that against them. The last story, "Dopplëganger, Poltergeist" was a mindblowingly excellent dissection of the American myth of Elvis, and our national nightmare of 9/11 and it should be put alongside Steve Erickson's Shadowbahn as a companion piece. Overall, a magnificent last collection of fiction from an author I'm eager to return to now and forever.