Denis Johnson as man of constant sorrow and a loyal friend

Pretty sure I posted on Denis Johnson's story Strangler bob, the 3rd of 5 in his final collection (The Largesse of the Sea Maiden) when it ran pretty recently in the NYer - a classic DJ story about a young man in a county lockup, addicted, in extreme despair, and about the scary and demented characters he meets behind bars, how he manages to get along, and the sorry fates of all those who emerge from such prison hardships - so will focus on the 4th story in the collection, Triumph Over the Grave (I keep forgetting this title and had to look it up): Part of the eerie beauty of this story, definitely one of DJ's best and somewhat atypical of his work, is our constant awareness that the story itself is a triumph over the grave, as DJ seemed to be well aware that this would be published posthumously - a fact his recognizes explicitly in the final knock-out pages. This is to my knowledge his only story that focuses on his work as a writer, w/ the protagonist being someone who seems to be a writer similar to DJ, a man who has triumphed over adversity, and who is somewhat amazed and befuddled by his literary success. The story floats easily along several narrative streams that toward the end converge: his learning by a chance phone call of the death of a friend, his attendance in a hospital as another friend awaits death, a memory - with a flash he tells us this is what it's like to be a writer, your thoughts and mental rhythms can take the story anywhere, which is true - of a knee procedure he underwent when young and foolish and high on LSD, then the most important I think part of the story, a remembrance of a (recent?) stint as a visiting writer at UT and his befriending an older writer whose success, one novel adapted into a film, lay well into the past. DJ plays a mind game with us, saying that it's conventional to give these true-to-life characters fake names but that he will use the writer's real name (a Google search suggests that he does not do so). This final part of the story, which segues back to the hospitalized friend, examines friendship: among men, among writers, and in a sense between writers and their unknown readers - a touching story w/out being sentimental, and a counterweight to all the hardened criminal/addict stories that have made DJ famous and that we too easily assume represent the scope of his character. No, it's obvious from this story that DJ was a noble spirit who lived through difficult experiences, made much of his experiences through art and imagination, and. though we are warned to be cautious in identifying the writer with his works, was throughout a good and loyal friend and a man of constant sorrow.