B. S. Johnson's suicide in 1973 seems in many ways the fulfillment of his life as a novelist: there are few writers for whom life and art are so inextricably bound. This is not to suggest that one should look to Johnson's novels for the facts of his life or for the causes of his death. But he spoke so insistently of his novels as "truth," made such frequent use of incidents and characters from his life in his novels, and died so soon after completing the most intimate and compelling of them--an account of the life of his mother, occasioned by her recent death--that it is impossible to consider separately his art and his life. Above all other subjects, Johnson wrote of the painful yet life-giving process of integrating novels and life. Reading his books, observing his life, one discerns not merely a rare individual--restless and disturbed, imaginative...