[...] The mechanic, older than I was by ten years, and with a stronger personality, turned out to be domineering and manipulative, a bit like Alain Delon is toward Marianne Faithfull. And unfortunately, like Faithfull’s character in the film, I was under his influence, even if my interest in bikes—after the Guzzi I moved to Japanese street machines—was entirely my own. The mechanic helped me put together a race-ready Kawasaki Ninja for a dangerous and illegal road race that he, too, was riding in. Participating in the race meant both meeting his standards of skill and courage and embarking on a journey alone. I wanted his approval, I guess, but I also wanted to be liberated from that dynamic. Even if it’s a man who sets a woman on a journey, for the duration of the journey, she’s kinetic and unfettered and alone.

Mira, who had been transferred from her wheelchair to the couch, sat and fidgeted. She understood no English but was forced to quietly pretend she was listening. I kept smiling at her, and she smiled back. I was desperate to give her something, to promise something. It’s very difficult to see a child who has suffered so tremendously. It’s basically unbearable. I should give her the ring I was wearing, I thought. But then I saw that it would never fit her fingers, which were very swollen and large, despite her young age; her development, after the fire, was thwarted because her bones could not properly grow. I’d give her my earrings, was my next idea, and then I realized that her ears had been burned off in the fire. I felt obscene. I sat and smiled as if my oversize teeth could beam a protective fiction over this poor child, blind us both to the truth, that no shallow gesture or petty generosity would make any lasting difference, and that her life was going to be difficult.

The “green translucence in the yards” is high-flown, and yet I do not doubt that it was the salient vision to share. Every sentiment and gesture in Jesus’ Son feels true, and not all writers approach anything true in what they write, but instead have other types of gifts, and skills, for braiding imagery or manipulating cadence, pulling off stunts. Literature, even really good literature, is sometimes more like a beautiful baroque carpet than it is like life. Denis Johnson, in all his work, aimed to locate the hidden, actual face of things. But the new stories build without those miraculous balls of hail, and their truths are deeper, and more precise, true as you would true a wheel. Jesus’ Son, by comparison, seems like work produced by the forceful energy of all the saved-up characters bursting to be seen and known by those who weren’t there, weren’t in the bar or out at the farm on the Old Highway. Weren’t riding around with Georgie, high on stolen hospital meds. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden operates on a different set of registers; it feels like the paced vision of a writer who has been made to understand that life is fairly rude and somewhat short, but the world contains an uneven distribution of grace, and wisdom lies in recognizing where it—such grace—has presented itself. The stories are about death and immortality, art and its reach, and they ask elemental questions about fiction, not as a literary genre but as a human tendency. The characters make narrative from what they witness: such as an Afghanistan war veteran telling a group of friends at a dinner party that he’ll remove his prosthetic leg if a woman who is present agrees to kiss his stump; she refuses but later marries this vet. As the narrator says to the reader: “You and I know what goes on.” Another man, wandering in his bathrobe in the quiet of night, encounters a sign for a store he believes offers “Sky and Celery,” but in fact it says “Ski and Cyclery.” “What goes on” is never a given, and always subjective. Wisps of narrativizing in this final collection shape thoughts that are sly, open-ended, and meticulously wise. It could be that the more a person knows, the less he needs to perform his gifts. These stories ask you to step into the room and listen closely. They are not showy anthems, and in many cases, they have dispensed with hindsight altogether.

The year before the Costa Concordia fell on its side and killed thirty-two people, it starred in a movie. Jean-Luc Godard’s Film socialisme has gambling and a brunch buffet, frantic disco, the banter of history, vanished gold, Palestine. Shot in HD, the footage transforms the enormous cruise liner into something mythical—dazzling, clean, massive, magnificent. There is the brilliant blue and rich yellow of its broad, glossy decks and gigantic smokestack. The sparkling white of its bulk and the froth of its glorious wake. The ship is the dream, the passengers its dreamers.

I’m thinking in particular of the series Luxury and Degradation, which features exact reproductions, in oil on canvas, of liquor advertisements that were contemporary when Koons made them, in 1986. The paintings pair well-known slogans—“I could go for something Gordon’s” and “I assume you drink Martell”—with staged images, combinations whose effects are both curiously meaningless and strangely charged. Replicated and monumentalized as art, they are not bubblegum Koons—dazzle that masquerades as innocence and puerility, under which lies a kind of darkness, even nastiness—and instead, flat and caustic at once.

Hard liquor is not the aesthetic or spiritual hearth of a feel-good world, the mirror in which people want to see themselves. Even if liquor does hold some promise of revelry, of escape, the ads for it are a mediated layer away from that. They are corporate fictions that do not ignite privately stored memories from good times, bad times, or any times. Mostly, they ignite memories of looking at the ads themselves—in magazines, on roadway billboards, or elsewhere—giving a sense of déjà vu. (What is being done to me? Something, but I can’t name it.)

The company had another ad in the same series, a similar couple, good-looking young professionals, reading different parts of a newspaper that is spread over the floor in some kind of magnificent domicile, huge and unfurnished. Trying to decode what kind of space it is, I’m reminded of a comment in Amazons, a novel DeLillo wrote under a pseudonym, that “apartments sprawl,” while “houses ramble.” We are in the territory of the sell. The couple lounges around in a sprawling apartment somewhere on the East Coast (he’s wearing sockless loafers). It’s clearly Sunday, given the size of the newspaper dismantled on the floor. He touches her hair with the end of his pencil. It’s the same gesture, if a different pair of actors/models, as the light tug on the shirttail at the beach. It’s, Stop pretending to finish that Times crossword puzzle. What happens next is off-screen, but on the screens of our imagining. Not anything explicit. Just possibility.

Koons’s linking of refinement with debasement recalls Joan Didion’s closing comment in her essay on the Getty Villa, which, she says, serves as “a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them the least.” Tacky and overt signs of luxury are for the poor. Tasteful, subdued signs of luxury are for the rich. But the very richest do not buy Frangelico. They buy Jeff Koons paintings of liquor advertisements, sure that they are in on the joke, which is how any palpable contract—between peddler and consumer, artist and critic, artist and collector—functions best.

At the height of a roiling controversy, before Kanders ultimately resigned from the Whitney board—and well before Safariland tear gas canisters were fired on crowds of American protestors in cities small and large across this country after the murder of George Floyd—I found myself in a social situation that included a different Whitney trustee, at a dinner party where this trustee felt comfortable and assumed she was with her own kind. (One of the many ironies of the art world is the palpable contract between the wealthy who sustain the art and artists who make it. The lowly writer, outside this contract, is nonetheless occasionally summoned to appear, paid in dinner, and expected to behave.) This trustee, a woman in a silver bubble jacket, assured me that “Tear gas is not only necessary but sometimes it’s really quite desirable!” The civilized way to lay down the law. “I mean, imagine if we didn’t have it!” She invoked Ferguson and other “scary” situations. I transitioned away from her and poured myself a drink.

What the trustee meant to make explicit, without having to spell it out—because why should this woman in a silver bubble jacket, esteemed patron of the arts, have to speak in a language not graced with nuance, given that abstraction, after all, is the language of the rich?—what she really meant to communicate to me was that the alternative to tear gas was shooting people, and with live ammunition, and at least none of the trustees were involved in that!

On the opposite end of the spectrum was a soulless event we worked for a company party at a giant stadium somewhere in the South Bay. It was a private concert given by Rod Stewart for the employees of whatever company it was (I don’t recall). We had to wear ugly polo shirts and khakis, and everyone was making fun of one another in these sad outfits. We served, at that event, four types of drink: Bud Light, Bud Dry, regular Budweiser, and some other Bud derivation. Attendees at this corporate event mulled the options like they were actual choices. “Hmm. So hard to decide. How about… a Bud Light?” Rod Stewart came out and preened and whooped like this wasn’t just some hellish money gig for him. The crowd loved it. Don’t want to give raises and benefits? Hire Rod Stewart once a year, and serve Bud Light.

A month after Jerry died, PJ Harvey played two sold-out shows at the Warfield, and after her second show she played a secret impromptu set at the Hotel Utah, a dive bar South of Market. The show began at one a.m., after her show at the Warfield. I don’t know how I got invited but I went. The Hotel Utah was a tiny room—it fit maybe forty people and about half those there that night were band members and other musicians who took turns onstage, sitting in. PJ Harvey played all night. I think I left at about five a.m., and she was still playing. She did not get tired, and she did not look tired. She looked joyous, like a person in a church, filling her soul with Holy Spirit as she sang. She stopped only to change guitars, and the entire time, she had this otherworldly glow. I was witness to an artist who wanted to play all night because she was born to do it. She had passion, talent, and incredible technical skills. She sang and played guitar for hours and hours, in an intimate setting, after she had performed a fully rehearsed stadium act for thousands, that very same night. This impressed me. The message I took from it was: to be truly good at something is the very highest joy. And by inference, I understood this: to merely witness greatness is a distant cousin, or even not related at all.