Johnson wrote five stunning stories about life and death before passing away last year.
He presents himself as a man implicitly preparing for his final act in life.
Johnson, it turned out, would write this character and tell this story in his own final act.
Credit: Random House
In Largesse, Johnson fully recreates a life lived, however occasionally sorrowful or dull or strange.
But in the aftermath of Johnsons death, absorbing this particular work makes for an especially cathartic experience.
There are narrative patterns between each of the five stories which powerfully unify the book in theme and feeling.
Cindy Johnson
The memories of people beyond their grasp range from wistful to caustic to surreal.
Tellingly, these characters ruminate on their encounters with art in profound and edifying ways.
Few have linked themselves between the reader and the page so intimately so cosmically as he does here.
The world keeps turning, the aging writer says at the very end of Triumph, addressing his reader.
Its plain to you that at the time I write this, Im not dead.
But maybe by the time you read it.A
