I find myself floating in a surprisingly deep well of thought after reading this slim work. Johnson is a master of prose. Of internal emotional expression. With equal potency, his work grapples with pain and loss in a way I've rarely encountered. There is a patience here. An understanding of tragedy and the cruelty of life that is redemptive and beautiful in its bracing honesty and refusal to provide answers. His stories grip while remaining elusive, and The Name of the World is no exception. I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

The Name of the World
Denis Johnson

HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022, 2000

The Name of the World by Denis Johnson is essentially about a washed up college professor, Michael Reed, aimlessly wandering through life four years after the death of his wife and daughter. He has seemed to have lost his lust for life and is just going through the motions. What ensues is a very fluid and unique storyline.
At first it is hard to get used to the writing style of this piece. It is told in the first person, from Michael’s perspective. The story follows him and whatever stream of consciousness his character ends up on. From the beginning he explains his position at the school and how he doesn’t really care for it. This takes us to a dinner party, then on a brief journey to a skate park and so forth. This is how the book goes. For the most part it follows a linear storyline, a few times some backtracking is required to fully explain a situation and Michael takes us briefly back in time. At first this can be a bit jarring; the absence of chapters for example makes it one continuous story not broken down into segments. Each small part of the story bleeds into another. However, this makes much more sense when you realize that this is Michael’s character. He is essentially a tumbleweed going wherever the wind takes him in his small sad life, although he has not allowed it to take him too far out of his town.
For example, he develops a strange obsession with a student from his school, Flower Cannon, which he meets early on in the book. After running into her a few times elsewhere, he sees her at the supermarket and decides to follow her out of the store. This leads him to a religious gathering to which she goes to “just for the music,” and then back to her place, where the core action for the story takes place. At one point in the book he loses his job, and without anywhere else to be he packs up his home, waiting to find out where that is.
The most interesting thing about this book was that the characters that came into Michael’s life seemed to be more like projections from his mind and of himself than of actual people in his life. More often than once he questions whether or not Flower is real or a “ghost.” He seems to believe she may be the ghost of his daughter or what she could have become if she was not killed in a car crash when she was five. Eventually, due to his interactions with Flower he is able to accept what happened, and the he needs to allow himself to “break.” After their final encounter he never hears from her again.
This is a book that leaves much up to the reader’s interpretation. During the course of the story, one could argue that for the most part, Michael Reed seems completely sane; it’s everyone around him that isn’t. However, if one was to argue for the point that he is not completely sane and is spiraling into madness, there is a lot of evidence to prove that theory as well. The biggest being his uncertainty towards everything and the questionable sanity of others around him.
It is a quick read, but not an easy one. The story moves quickly from one thought to the next. If one thought is missed the reader may find her or himself lost in the maze of the main character’s mind.

Hoe de draden van rouw zich verknopen in het voortgaande leven totdat de tijd zelf in opstand komt en iets van een fout antwoord genereert. Maar in ieder geval een antwoord.

At most a novella and probably a big short story bound as a book, this is largely a tale of emergence. The narrator is a Mid-Western history professor who lost his wife and 5-year-old daughter in a car wreck and has never dealt. For 80 or more pages, he bounces like a slow-rolling pinball off increasingly more bizarre characters and incidents until the dam finally breaks, and the emergence is well worth the wait. Initially a mood piece, this piece builds toward a confounding transformation that I can't imagine in the hands of another writer. A slowly beautiful book.

it wouldn't be claiming too much to say that as i sat there holding in my fingers mr. hicks's list of head-injury victims i felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities. and childhood's low-grade astonishments, its intimations of a perpetual circus... meeting, at random, kids with small remarkable talents or traits, with double-jointed thumbs, a third or even a fourth set of teeth. i don't claim i enjoyed those long-ago days very much, they were so full of ridiculous horrors, but there was also this capacity of the universe to delight by turning up, like a beautiful shell on a long empty beach, a kid whose older teen-aged sister liked to show off her bare breasts, or a boy who could take a drag off a cigarette, pinch his mouth and nostrils shut, and force smoke out through his ears. what happened to them? the boy whose hands were an optical illusion. his hands looked reasonably proportioned and complete, they were unremarkable until you looked closely and discovered that each hand had only three fingers, plus a thumb. but if you asked me, 'which finger was missing?' i couldn't have chosen. all his fingers seemed to be there.

This was a curious little novella, with a protagonist numbed by grief whose defining trait seems to be that he doesn't really want anything, and the barest thread of plot to draw the reader through. The supporting characters are interesting (especially Flower), and there are little treasures of language that kept me digging. I think the conceit wouldn't have worked much longer than the 129 pages Johnson gives it, but in that small space he does make you root for Michael Reed, make you hope that in the end he'll feel something.

I really enjoyed some elements of his writing - there were at least a few really poignant moments. I can't quite decide whether or not these were enough to cancel out the number of cliches and overindulgences.

I also can't remember how this book fell into my hands - I think I just wanted something short and easy to carry on the bus and grabbed it on a whim. I've just read Johnson's Wikipedia entry and realized that perhaps this wasn't the best choice as intro to his writing. Maybe I'll try the one that won the National Book Award, or one of his poetry anthologies next time.

Sentence for sentence, The Name of the World is a beautiful book. Denis Johnson's lyrical prose and the flowing nature of the story really made me want to like this. Alas, this grown up manic pixie dream girl novella did not do it for me.

This story is about a professor at an unnamed Midwestern college who is in a cloud of depression following the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident. Most of the book is him wandering around his community and meeting some strange people and thinking about things. He meets a young art student named Flower Cannon several times, and she once again unlocks his zest for life.

Although it was done in a more complex way than most stories with a similar plot, I found myself internally rolling my eyes at how everything unfolded towards the end. The beginning and middle dragged horribly, despite it only being 129 pages.

I want to read more of Denis Johnson's work just because I enjoyed the writing here. Maybe some of his other short stories or books will be more to my liking.

This is a slim book that's low on plot, high on character development. The voice is genuine, and convincing, and the characters are fascinating. All in all, though, I would have preferred more -- certainly there was more to tell, if not of this broken man's half-hearted wanderings through the world, then certainly of Flower Cannon, his enigmatic female lead.

Perhaps I'll pick up another Denis Johnson, and see what else he can do.

There were occasional interesting observations concerning fear and history. I liked the idea that any fear--even fear of the unknown--presumes that our world is predictable and that variations on past horrors will happen again; embracing unpredictability, though irrational and insane, is in its own way liberating.

So there were things to be liked.

But the character of Flower Cannon is one of the most heinous Manic Pixie Dream Girls I've ever encountered. She was okay for a while: I liked that she was critical of the party, rather than awed by it, even if she never expressed any opinions about art or politics the way the men did. And despite the mystery of her identity for the first few scenes, for a while she was almost refreshingly unenigmatic. But then there was that eyeroll-y pubic shaving as art installation scene (GAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSPPPPPPPPPPP), so devoid of the provocative and colorful shrewdness it really wanted to have. Also, for the love of God her name is Flower. Cannon. And she picked it herself.

I suppose you could make an argument that (a) Flower's sexuality is treated so clinically to make objectification of her seem repulsive and (b) the reveal about her childhood is meant to explain her weirdness, meaning that these kinds of wacko women stock characters are the products of a culture that traumatizes them (or fictional constructs of a culture that wants to shock them into being), but those are maybe giving Johnson too much credit (disclosure: this is the first and to date only work of his I've read).

There was also some weird race stuff going on with nearly all of the characters of color (except Tiberius) being service workers. Is this a jab at the flimsy liberalism of an academic system that distances itself from Reed at the mere possibility of his conservatism (in a gesture of almost willfully impotent storytelling, this is never confirmed or denied) while maintaining a status quo of unquestioned white privilege? I think it could be--Tiberius's madness and the way the university simultaneously ignores and rewards him supports that conclusion--but again, I haven't read enough of Johnson's work to know how deliberate some of those choices were.

Maybe these are tiresome complaints about race and gender since they are so common everywhere, but also I am just tired of seeing them everywhere.

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"The Name of the World" is a novel that traces the grief within the soul of Michael Reed, a man disconnected from life after the death of his wife and daughter.

In his attempt to fill the void of an irreplaceable loss, Reed tries to connect with both real and imaginary people, though his efforts are often clumsy and, in many ways, done unwillingly.

As readers, we share in Reed's sorrow, experiencing his mourning through his eyes. In his early fifties, Reed cannot seem to forget either his wife or his daughter. This novel mirrors the struggle of a man who, fully aware that the piece he has lost is in fact a part of himself, continues his efforts to live. Reed is a deeply lonely man, isolated in his sorrow.

As I read, I was reminded of both Mark Haber's "Lesser Ruins" and John William's "Stoner". If you enjoy these two novels, you will likely appreciate this one as well, which features a protagonist who is even more inclined to drift from reality.

Read in one day. It is hard to follow some of the harsh criticism here. (We do not accuse authors of writing poor autobiography if we do not understand their writing. Approaching Sigmund Freud as „Oh, he must have had a lot of problems“, for example, is rather shallow.)
I was taken in by Mr Johnson‘s great writing skills, often a pleasure when poets also write novels, as long as they can hold the line and keep the plot going, which Mr Johnson manages just wonderfully, thank you very much.
Here‘s a man (protagonist ≠ author, remember, BlackOxford) coming to terms not only with his grief over a terrible loss but also with the realisation that he has spent four years doing very little about coming over this grief. He needs a catalyst and finds this in a rather fascinating, if clearly very wild, Wild Child (the story behind whose name might indeed be termed „somewhat belaboured“, I guess).
As as I said, picked it up and only put it down when finished. Should do this more often, you really get into a work very differently this way.
Thanks, Mr. Johnson, for this one!

Re-read two years later and not so sure about rave review after initial read.