New Yorker Fiction 2014

A WRITER'S WIT
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
John Steinbeck
Born February 27, 1902

Longer Than One Expects

March 3, 2014, Denis Johnson, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden”: Bill Whitman, a sixty-three-year-old ad man living in San Diego, recalls his life as he returns to New York to receive an award for a thirty-second bank commercial. ¶ There is in this story a bit of Johnson’s mordant wit: “. . . and what little of it she managed to make comprehensible didn’t even merit being called shallow”—much of what I cherished about his novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991). ¶ Johnson’s story is comprised of ten sections, each a mini-narrative of its own. They seem somewhat disjointed, but one comes to realize that they make up the cumulative narrative of this man’s life—much like our own narratives, wandering but all related to one another in the end. Whitman is at that point we all reach, whether we realize it or not: “I note that I’ve lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future.” ¶ The title must be derived from the final paragraph (Johnson claims to have seen the phrase in a book of fairy tales):

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“Once in a while, I lie there as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon the sea maidens, eggs that fulfill my wish, and pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again.”

Johnson's The Laughing Monsters is out next fall.
[The magazine lists no credit for the story’s illustration.]

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