The Name of the World: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Since my early teens I've associated everything to do with college, the "academic life," with certain images borne toward me, I suppose, from the TV..." (more)
Key Phrases: Flower Cannon, Michael Reed, Tiberius Soames (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Name of the World finds Denis Johnson the visionary poet and Denis Johnson the sober novelist engaged in a puzzling tug of war. What begins as a muted evocation of grief takes increasingly strange turns, until the novel's second half spins away from the narrative logic of the first. The result is, well, mixed, a beautiful mess glued together mostly by the power of Johnson's transcendent prose. The protagonist this time around is not a junkie or a drug dealer or even a writer, but a college professor whose wife and child died four years earlier in an automobile accident. Michael Reed walks, he talks, he teaches, but inside his thoughts rip "perpetually around a track like dogs after a mechanized rabbit." Not much has happened since their death, and numbed by the habit of grief, he thinks that's just fine. "Nothing was required of me," Reed thinks. "I just had to put one foot in front of the other, and one day I'd wander wide enough of my dark cold sun to break gently from my orbit."

That occasion comes when Reed reaches the premature end of his university appointment--and meets a redheaded cellist, the sort of wild, witchy, and becomingly deranged coed often found in books but perhaps less often in life. Flower Cannon (not, as one may imagine, the name she was born with) also shaves her pubic hair as public performance art and offers stripteases for fun and profit on the side. As the novel grows less coherent, Reed blunders into her childhood dream, or memory, which echoes his own dream and is also somehow haunted by the ghost of his daughter, or maybe Flower herself is the ghost of his daughter, or, well, something to that effect. (Dialogue such as "You. Are you a siren? A witch?" does little to clarify the situation.) But in the end it doesn't matter, because the dilemma this student presents Reed is as old as all time, and as easy to describe: "To let my wife and child be dead. I didn't think I was cruel enough for that. Because that is what the imperfections in Flower's skin invited me to do. There was a sense in which Anne and Elsie had to be killed, and killing them was up to me."

Actually, this sort of straightforward psychological exposition isn't really Johnson's bag. Like his antihero, he's after "the unforeseen"--that which can't be explained in words but only suggested through imagery, the more shocking the better. "In my current frame of mind I'd hoped for warnings much stranger and not so obvious," Reed thinks after reading a religious tract. In a similar vein, Johnson instructs us how to read his book: "I think this narrative might cohere, if I ask you to fix it with this vision: luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowering vagueness." Vagueness does indeed flower here, but it does so amid flashes of genuine brilliance, the kind of writing that gave the classic Jesus' Son its particular brand of unhinged lyricism.

Reed, for instance, is surrounded by characters in memorably Johnsonian states of desperation. History professor Tiberius Soames, fresh on the heels of a nervous breakdown: "Michael, we must get out of this flatness. The flatness and the regimented plant life. The vastly regimented plant life"; the caterer, a Peter Lorre look-alike who calls herself the Froggy Bitch and has the "smashed sinuses of an English bulldog"; the head trauma patient who wanders the grounds of a former lunatic asylum, holding aloft a small, imaginary object like an invisible torch: "I don't know. I can't see it. It's very light." No one but Johnson could bestow such radiant strangeness upon the inhabitants of a Midwestern college town. And if Reed's final, defiantly unreflective stance isn't much of a revelation, well, one hates to request a man with a knife sticking out of his eye in every Denis Johnson book. As brief and vivid as a hallucination, The Name of the World is the work of a prose musician who wisely refuses to play the same note twice. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Spare, introspective and arresting, Johnson's (Jesus' Son; Already Dead) new novel explores a middle-aged college professor's attempts to come to terms with the gruesome twist of fate that has robbed him of his family. After losing his wife, Anne, and daughter, Elsie, in a tragic automobile accident, ex-political speechwriter Mike Reed seeks refuge in the insular world of academia. Cloistered deep in the bosom of an unnamed Midwestern university, he teaches history, halfheartedly tries to obtain a research grant and reflects morosely on his losses. In episodic vignettes, Mike fails to impress his departmental superiors with his professorial aptitude, visits a Native American casino where he gets involved in a pointless barroom imbroglio, and becomes obsessed with the eccentric but spirited Flower Cannon, a sexy red-headed student/performance-artist/cellist/stripper. Johnson depicts Mike's emotional paralysis and anguished bouts of uncertain self-exploration with pellucid clarity and uncommon sensitivity. His gift for restrained yet elegant prose is evident, as is his ability to blend erudite reflection with hints of humor. A simple painting, charting a gradually deteriorating geometric progression, that Mike encounters in a campus museum early in the novel leads him to half-seriously opine that the picture "illustrated the church's grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governmentsAimplicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make." Though some may find it pretentious, the novel is crammed with similar observations mixing cynicism and self-aware humor, ambitious theorizing and multidisciplinary savvy. In the end, Johnson's eloquent examination of one man's persistent inability to extricate himself from the tenacity of grief manages to be both lyrical and raw. (July) FYI: A movie based on Jesus' Son will open in June.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; 1st edition (June 20, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060192488
• ISBN-13: 978-0060192488
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,006,609 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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 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)

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" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

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.