Wealth & Money Quote by Denis Johnson

A Denis Johnson narrator never declares defeat with melodrama; he registers it the way you’d register bad weather. The bluntness here is the trick: marriage arrives as a plain fact, not a redemptive plot point, and “the money ran out right away” lands with the indifferent inevitability of gravity. Johnson’s intent is less confession than diagnosis. He’s showing how quickly an ordinary life event can tip into a private apocalypse when you’re already living on fumes.

The sentence “it just came over me” is doing heavy lifting. It frames the thought not as a decision but as possession, a kind of mental weather system rolling in. That’s classic Johnson subtext: the self isn’t steering; it’s being steered by addiction, depression, exhaustion, or some nameless spiritual vacancy. “I was never going to work again” isn’t laziness so much as a sudden, terrifying loss of futurity. Work stands in for participation in the social contract, for the basic belief that tomorrow can be bargained with. When that belief collapses, the mind doesn’t argue; it “hits.”

Contextually, Johnson’s fiction and reportage orbit people at the edge of employability and stability, where love and vows don’t automatically produce structure. The marriage doesn’t solve anything; it raises the stakes. There’s also a grim comedy in the pacing: meet woman, marry, money gone, revelation. The American script of reboot and responsibility is speed-run into failure, exposing how thin the margin is between “starting over” and simply falling through the floor.