The Name of the World by Denis Johnson, Paperback

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Denis Johnson's The Name of the World is a slim, starkly beautiful novel. In the aftermath of a car accident that kills his wife and child, Mike Reed leaves his job as chief aide to a U.S. senator, and when his book proposal is turned down ("I'd offered to witness power's corrupting influence, but apparently no such witness was required") takes a job as an adjunct professor of history at a pleasant, faceless midwestern university. Reed is persuasively rendered as a walking dead man, the kind of character absolutely no one can paint better than Johnson. This novel stands with his best work, which includes the visionary novel Fiskadoro and the cult-fave story collection Jesus' Son.

—Mark Winegardner, a professor in the creative writing program at Florida State University, is the author of four books, including the novel The Veracruz Blues.

The Name of the World

Denis Johnson is the author of six works of fiction, each of which conjures up a wholly surreal and yet accurate portrait of some corner of America, from Florida to Seattle to Provincetown to southern California. Read more than one of his books and you begin to see, as does Johnson, the peculiar, David Lynchian threads woven into the warp and woof of our social fabric. In his slender new novel, The Name of the World, Johnson moves into the metaphysical and geographic dead center of the heartland with a powerful and impressionistic narrative about a lost soul adrift on the surface of small-time Midwestern academia.

World-weariness has long been a staple of introspective fiction and theatre. But where Shakespeare's Hamlet was tortured by a task to be done and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and his relatives at least had a huge estate to waste their lives tending to, Johnson's narrator has literally nothing to live for: His wife and small child are dead, killed in a car accident several years before the narrative begins, and he has found himself a meaningless, temporary post in a small university in the middle of rows upon row of cornfields. In some respects, readers will be reminded of the crushed academic of J. M. Coetzee's recent Booker Prize-winner Disgrace. But while Coetzee's book is launched by its protagonist's ill-fated affair with a student, the greater part of Johnson's book is but a prelude to the narrator's conclusive encounter with Flower Cannon—a beautiful, bizarre graduate student who dances strip-teases at Indian casinos, shaves her genitalia on stage as performance art, caters at faculty events, and haunts the narrator's dreams.

The Name of the World tells the story of a man who has completely lost his grip on any sort of reason to get up in the morning, and Johnson's true gift is at revealing the impressionistic, arbitrary quality of any existence when seen from such lifeless eyes. At a restaurant, the nameless narrator's companion programs a jukebox to play the same Paul McCartney song over and over. He visits a supermarket, buys supplies for several days' worth of meals, and then lets them rot while he dines at restaurants. Such details are both surreal and yet strangely, almost sickeningly mainstream American: Like David Foster Wallace's fantastic and overblown contemporary fantasies, Johnson challenges us to view his own fictions as anything but run-of-the-mill. This is the world we live in, he tells us; this world has the same name.

At points, the novel threatens to melt away into an impressionistic haze and become nothing more than one lost soul's arbitrary diary of loss; when, with 50 pages remaining, the narrator sums up his Midwestern academic world as "vapors of low-lying cynicism, occasional genius, and small polite terror," and goes on to describe his own story as "luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowing vagueness," it is easy to think that Johnson's observations are acute and his language brilliant, but that this is not enough. But he redeems the novel's abstractions with a final, deeply affecting sequence in which the narrator finally has his sexual encounter with Flower Cannon. She leads him to an abandoned school where she lives in a studio, steps behind her own canvases (turned to face the wall) and removes her clothes as she tells him the story of her name, and of a man who abducted her as a child and brought her to a "ginger-bread house" where there was another girl named Flower, apparently blind.

This final encounter, and Flower's story, pierces the façade the narrator has maintained throughout the book. Somehow he sees this other blind girl as his own lost child and understands once and for all that the wounds from that loss will never heal. Johnson's finale leaves the reader with the most powerful sort of spine-tingling, as happens when one wakes from an intense dream that is already slipping away. It is impossible to understand exactly what connections have been made, but they have been made nevertheless.

Some would say this is the highest aim of any art: whether or not that's the case, The Name of the World resonates with an emotional force that demonstrates, once again, that Johnson is one of the finest novelists writing today.

—Jake Kreilkamp

Los Angeles Times Book Review

How easy it is to forget, with all the trivia in print cluttering our lives, that words can be this supple a vehicle for transcendent healing.

Inquirer Philadelphia

Johnson's prose conjures up a world that is as tangible as it is magical. He is an utterly brilliant and original talent, a novelist who reminds us just how wonderful fiction can be.

Newsday

Denis Johnson is one of the few American writers who could legitimately be said to possess a visionary sensibility, a nearly Blakean appreciation of the territory of the human soul.

Elle

To put the matter simply, Denis Johnson is one of the best and most compelling novelist in the nation.

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

The story of a midwestern college professor who is forced to come to terms with his life after the death of his wife and child.

Library Journal

This lean but vivid and affecting novel drops us into the world of Michael Reed, who has managed to cocoon himself in a stable but inert life as a university professor after his wife and child are killed in an auto accident. Four years later, his contract expired and with no concrete future plans, Reed knows he needs to finish mourning and move on but can't quite figure out how. A sort of salvation comes in the form of Flower Cannon, a free-spirited student who serendipitously reappears in his path. A simple plot, but for Johnson, it's all in the details, from the hothouse community of academic colleagues down to the simple wisdom of the man who shines your shoes. Opting for quiet revelations, the novel also skillfully weaves away from expected paths; the burdened Reed doesn't explode in random violence, and Flower and Reed don't have a tempestuous love affair. Perhaps best known for the hallucinatory Jesus' Son, Johnson has created a contrasting work suggesting that his talents reach across a wide canvas. Highly recommended.--Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Entertainment Weekly

By the grateful finale, his journey feels like nothing less than a rebirth.

John Updike

Johnson's new novel, The Name of the World, has an eerie clarity of description and a subtly askew precision.
—The New Yorker

Steen

Reading Denis Johnson's new novel feels a bit like sitting thought a brief, intense summer storm, then basking in the mysterious calm that follows. The meaning of The Name of the World evaporates before you've grasped it; like much of Johnson's work, the book exists stubbornly in its own realm, without the usual reference points. But that, of course, is the beauty of it.
—Time Out New York

Robert Stone

Johnson's unique lyricism lights up his book's interior world . . . There's no doubt about the power of this writer's vision...
—The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

A traumatized widower is painfully and gradually recalled to life in this deceptively simple—and surprisingly absorbing—short novel by the well-known poet and author (Already Dead, 1997, etc.). Narrator Michael Reed is a freelance writer and teacher of history who's attempting to lose himself in work—and various degrees of intimacy with colleagues (at a nameless midwestern college where he had recently put down roots) and random acquaintances—after his young wife and small daughter are killed in an automobile accident. Johnson precisely delineates how Michael experiences and absorbs "little" everyday manifestations of survival and commitment—in such nonspecific ephemera as the carnival atmosphere of student life ("whoops and laughter like the cries of wildlife"), a shoe shine, an impulsive visit to a strip joint, even a quiet few moments at a religious fellowship's "Sing Night," where he observes a dreamy deaf boy who seemingly "hears" the music. We gradually understand how he saves himself by becoming interested and—albeit only marginally—involved in other people's lives, particularly that of the improbably named Flower Cannon, a cellist and sexual iconoclast who fascinates him "Because you do crazy things without having to be crazy." Reed in fact goes beyond the pale himself, in climactic acts of vandalism and irresponsibility that seem (a bit less believably, here) to incarnate his rediscovery of the power of simple actions to move us, and moderate the grief that accompanies "the understanding that everything passes away." This deft novel pretty much defies summary, but itsclear,dispassionate gaze shows us both unassumingly quotidian and willfully bizarre situations and actions as credible, even reasonable expressions of its characters' outward impulses and inner natures.

The Name of the World

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