The sadness of reading the final story collection from Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson will always be ranked among the best American writers, in particular of short fiction, of the late 20th/early 21st century; nobody who's read his work would be totally surprised by his untimely death - he was one writer who lived on and sometimes over the edge, if we can infer from his fiction even a glimpse of the life he must have, at times, led. So now we have what the publisher calls his final collection, five relatively long stories including title piece, The Largess of the Sea Maiden. I've read that and the 2nd story in the collection, The Starlight on Idaho - and from these two we can see the darkness and the struggles that beset most of his writing and, sadly, much of his life. The title story, actually, is perhaps a little less troubled - a lot of drinking and a lot of sorrow but not the desperate stories of addiction and ancillary criminality that we saw in his most famous collection, Jesus' Son. The title story (and I don't really get the title, btw) is about an ad exec of all things, living in San Diego, having forsaken the more prosperous life open to him early in his career in NYC, who goes back to NYC to receive an award for one of his advertisements - simple enough, and familiar to to most readers via memories of Mad Men - but there's an underlying sorrow throughout the story. The is written in short, titled segments (e.g., Casanova, Orphan ... ), and it begins with a few episodes of heavy drinking and odd, self-destructive behavior at polite dinner parties - a cross between Dostoyevsky and Carver - and then moves into some of the protagonist's recollection of strange events and encounters in his life, w/ a particular emphasis on outsider artists. We get a gut punch at the end when the protag sums the sorrow and disappointments of his life - and he is among the healthiest of Johnson's figures. The 2nd story is more familiar DJ turf, a recovery clinic (amusingly, the title refers to the former Starlight Motel on Idaho Ave., in Ukiah, Cal - more Carver territory there, actually) and is told in a series of harrowing letters (some never sent, obviously) from one of the recovering addicts; DJ manages to tell an entire life story through these disjointed, sometimes only loosely coherent, messages. It's not clear to me whether these are stories that DJ considered finished and ready for publication in current form or whether some of the material was still inchoate, in sketch form even, at the time of his death last year. Either way, at least the first two are powerful and among his best work.