Customer Reviews

The Name of the World: A Novel

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This novel/novella is a very short work (143 pages) but reads like a tweener ( a too long, short story or a novel that didn't quite develope). The work would be a great 70 pager with some cuts. The author does not develop the story as he does in his other work. He seems to meander trying to get his point of an obsession of a professor for a college girl, while feeling sorrow and guilt for his deceased family.

Here's the source: I'm a big Denis Johnson fan. If I had read his stuff during puberty, I would probably be gay and stalking him right now. Hope that's not offensive.

It's not a bad book, but in my opinion it's the worst Denis Johnson book. It read like a draft that had been bleached. The desperation, emptiness, and desolation aren't counterbalanced by unbelievable metaphors and very-believable grit as well as they are in his other works. The characters and plot have quirks and purpose, but they're missing connective tissue between the two. And pay attention during the prolonged, fade-out ending, lest you try to read the blank pages after the text ends...

There were a couple of subtly beautiful moments, but I agree with the reviewer who recommended Jesus' Son. I would also recommend Angels and, if you like or could like poetry, The Incognito Lounge (which is in "The Throne of the..." etc collection). It would be a shame if you dismissed Johnson because you read this book first.

I am a devoted fan of "Jesus's Son" and think D.J.'s earlier novels are all quite interesting, though uneven and at times too portentous and sentimental. This one, however is so flat, melodramatic and unrealized that I cannot believe it would have been published without the "Jesus's Son" connection. The improbably unsophisticated narrator/protagonist, Michael Reed, plays out the last days of his temporary university appointment while trying to come to terms w/ the loss of his family four years earlier. Johnson leaves the social framework of the midwestern university flat and undramatized -- so there's little for the reader to catch hold of here. Reed's rather stale voice tends to override Johnson's own brilliant poetic intensity. The central female character, Flower Cannon is as ludicrous as her yin-yang name -- suffice it to say that her most fascinating act -- in Reed's eyes -- is shaving her pubis for a small audience of university students. Not trying to be P.C. here, but, the name of the world is not synonymous with "B.P". I think the novel's worth reading for Johnson fans, simply because it does have a few random absurdly funny and visionary moments and I think even the failures of someone this gifted are interesting. Otherwise, head directly for Jesus's Son, which has to be one of the most beautifully written works of American fiction of the late twentieth century!

Denis Johnson's new novel is so poetically elliptical, but at the same time so full of nuance and detail and penetrating characterization that any attempt to explain it or write a "review" of it is probably nearly insane. However, anyone who has not read Denis Johnson, but who loves to think deeply and feel deeply; anyone who has ever felt "disenfranchised" or "misbegotten" or alien or other, needs to read this novel, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Jesus' Son, and Johnson's poetry. I cried and smiled at the same time when I finished this book, and it filled me with a sort of dark incandescence that I have carried with me for the past week since I've finished it. Johnson's collection of poems, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, is even more astounding. I carry a paperback copy with me everywhere I go (I bought it two years ago, mind you), and the hardcover, which is very marked up and dogeared, stays at home. Read Denis Johnson. He will expand your soul.

The Name of the World is Johnson's best work of fiction since Jesus' Son, and it rivals the latter in the quality of prose as well as the depth of compassion and understanding toward its wounded protagonist. This is a sincerely wonderful work, heartfelt and thought-provoking. In typical Johnson fashion the story is presented in a fashion simultaneously funny, tragic and bizarre. It is especially pleasing to see that Johnson is willing to take a risk with a shorter format, resiting the likely temptation to produce a 400-page blockbuster that has been the artistic ruin of so many other great writers. Instead, he has given us a graceful and brilliant work that is no less compelling and relevant despite its relative brevity. It reminded me of some of the shorter works of Cheever and Greene (most notably Oh, What a Paradise it Seems and Dr. Fischer of Geneva, respectively), with its shorter format and exploration of a soul tormented, use of mordant humor and compassionate exploration of the human condition. An outstanding work, once again, from America's finest living writer of fictional prose.

Reading Denis Johnson's THE NAME OF THE WORLD, I'm reminded of the way Neil Young once introduced a new song to a long-ago crowd at the Fillmore East: "Sorta starts off real slow and then it fizzles-out altogether." Protagonist Mike Reed is so spiritually denuded by his tragic past and the insipidity of his present that even Johnson's often masterful prose can't give him life. The only surprise here, I suppose, is that there isn't one. The book doesn't know where to end, and, though only one hundred twenty-nine pages, drags-on for the last forty or so perhaps only to escape the dreaded "novella" status. In the wake of minor masterpiece JESUS' SON, this quiet and cold little book is a mystery to me. Why, Denis?

In Denis Johnson's newest novel, the narrator presents a mostly affecting and occasionally comic meditation on loss and the things that still might tie one to life in a universe empty of meaning or permanence. The theme is as old as Lucretius, and the narrator's solution is reminiscent of Keats' line preferring "a life of sensations rather than thoughts" The emotionally dead narrator accordingly is brought back to 'life' by sudden outbursts of anger and a crying jag equally unplanned. Rather than trying to figure things out or anticipate the future, he elects to go with the flow of things inside and outside of himself. Perhaps fresher, and more persuasive, are the narrator's paeons to unpremeditated artistic expression, as in his commendations of a small child's lute playing which focuses solely and impressively on the truth of the music, not the notes in themselves; or in the praise of the "harmony" in the singing of a group of not overly reflective fundamentalists. The strength of this novel lies chiefly, I think, in the gorgeousness of its phrases. Johnson refers to a "banana moon," "the waterfall noise of a stadium crowd," etc. The world of the narrator, one of time and change, has been set before us with beauties that do not themselves quickly pass away.