The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

When a writer's first collection of stories was Jesus' Son, quite possibly the best American book of the last few decades, it's natural to ask how his second collection, published 26 years later, compares. (When it is also his last book—Johnson died last spring at the age of 67—that question carries some further poignancy.) The quick answer is that no book can compare to Jesus' Son, but the better answer is that the five long stories in this new book carry the same spirit. No writer could shift so easily, so surprisingly, so believably, from despair to ecstasy and back, often in a single sentence, and these stories are alive with those shifts, and, almost prophetically, with the hovering presence of death within life.