The Name of the World [Paperback]

Denis Johnson (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Harper; First Printing edition (2000)
• ASIN: B000OEL0Z6
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A brief, unsettling masterpiece, July 11, 2000

By 

Bryan Charles (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Name of the World: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is an eerie, effective little novel that can be read in a single sitting like a long short story (the text is uninterrupted by chapter headings or breaks of any kind). While thematically similar to Johnson's previous novel, Already Dead (and in fact most of his body of work), it couldn't be more different stylistically. Where Already Dead aimed for twisted excesses of plot and character, The Name of the World goes for sparse, restrained beauty. Johnson hasn't been this lyrical with this prose since Jesus' Son. Almost every sentence reads like a revelation, a last line to be savored and internalized. Even when things get loony, with Flower and her strange, rambling story, this remains a stunning meditation on human suffering and deliverance. At times, as Michael Reed unloaded his psychic trauma, I was reminded of Frank Bascombe, Richard Ford's sportswriter-turned-real-estate-agent. Like Reed, Bascombe also flirted with college teaching, for many of the same reasons and with similar results. Reed is ultimately a much darker character, but the similarities are there. The Name of the World is a truly great offering from one of our more talented fiction writers.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excess talent, August 15, 2000

By 

W. Flesch (arlington, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Name of the World: A Novel (Hardcover)

It's scary what a good writer Johnson is, and it must be scary to him. The Name of the World is an exploration of how far you can go if you trust your talent (and if you are as talented as Johnson) -- it's about seeing what happens when you go there: what happens when the eroticized goal of most fiction can be put aside in favor of another goal, an exploration of what can happen when eros is acknowledged and put aside. What you get is a kind of intensity that can only be literary -- can only be afforded by literary space. I don't mean that Johnson is an extreme experimentalist, although his originality is shocking. I mean that he's an explorer of extremity, and things get to that point in this book when you start wishing -- paradoxically -- for something other than the satisfaction of a wish. Johnson reminds us that literature isn't at its most intense about wish-fulfillment (as Freud suspected) but about what's other to all possibility of fulfillment: a kind of longing for the name of the world which is the only name it can have.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful fiction, October 14, 2001

By 

"elljay" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Name of the World: A Novel (Hardcover)

An oblique, perverse novel, "The Name of the World" strains credibility in its attempts to defy reader expectations--Johnson is not one to allow Event B to follow Event A; he'd rather throw in Event Z out of the blue, just for the heck of it--but the end result is nonetheless a strong, memorable, affecting book. It is not a "well-made" novel, though, and it may help to recall the willful craziness of "Jesus' Son," which made similar demands on the reader. Where the earlier book was a collection of interrelated stories, "The Name of the World" is one long first-person narrative, devoid of chapter breaks, which meanders all over the map--the basic strategy is more or less the same, though. It's a "mess," but I'm certain the mess is deliberate, and the narrative is hypnotically effective. Far from a failure, it strikes me as a book by a very confident writer at the top of his game.