Like this:
There are continuities with Johnson’s earlier work; the visionary, miraculous element in Johnson’s deceptively tough realism makes beautiful appearances. The hard, declarative sentences keep their powder dry for pages at a time, and then suddenly flare into lyricism. The story’s unaffected tact and honesty are admirable. There are several compactly realized minor characters, caught in a sentence or two; Johnson’s gift for quick, glancing portraiture is evident. Johnson’s fiction has always turned on questions of vision. His characters are often weirdly privileged noticers, sometimes stoned. Grainier is not stoned, but he is a steady noticer of the natural world, and the prose follows his eye with frequent exhalations of beauty, for example, a cluster of butterflies, fluttering “magically like leaves without trees.”
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