After watching Train Dreams, a movie based on a novel by Denis Johnson, I knew I had to read some of Johnson’s books.
This weekend, while in Santa Barbara, I walked into a store called Book Den and bought The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. According to the table of contents, it contains five short stories by Johnson, but really, it contains something like twenty. I got a bargain! Each of the stories is composed of a few sub-stories. They are good in isolation, but I mostly don’t understand why Johnson thought they belonged together. The other question I kept asking myself is, to what extent are those stories autobiographical? The stories are about drugs and drinking, with sentences like this:
Very often I sold my blood to buy wine.
or this:
If I could drink liquor without being drunk all the time, I’d certainly drink enough to be drunk half the time.
They’re in the first person, and they could plausibly have happened to Johnson. As far as I can tell after skimming his Wikipedia page, he had a rough life, especially in his twenties and thirties.
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden isn’t a long book, and I got halfway through it lying on the bed in our Santa Barbara hotel room while my wife was getting ready to go out. At one point, I laughed so hard that she poked her head out of the bathroom to see what was so amusing. I read the section to her, and she rolled her eyes, but also smiled a little. Johnson’s writing is very funny in places, which I didn’t expect, because Train Dreams, excellent as it is, has no trace of humor in it.
I finished the second half on the plane on the way home, careful not to alarm the flight attendants with additional outbursts of hilarity. I’ll have to keep looking out for more of Johnson’s books.
