I was actually disappointed. I felt like this author is one of those hit or miss and for me it was a huge miss. Not only did it lack a plot but I disliked the characters. it had a very Farewell to Arms feeling- 2 people who get together but it's like just conversations and them just hanging out but no driving thing that makes each character grow and change and then conclusion, and maybe it's I hate stories where there are no developments but these characters really had no development as the book went on. So for me it was just an ok book and am surprised it was a pulitzer lister.

Denis Johnson, for me, is one of those writers whose work is fairly inconsistent. Some of his books are exceptional while others are less so. This book just wasn't as good as most of his, in my opinion. It's the story of a fifty three year old man whose wife and daughter had died in a car accident a few years previously and his life has been in a tailspin ever since. He is on the verge of losing his teaching position because he hasn't attained tenure and seems to be indifferent to it. He becomes infatuated with a young girl in her twenties named Flower Cannon who he sees at different venues and eventually meets. They form a curious short friendship that eventually leads nowhere and he carries on with his life after that.

Johnson’s prose is as gorgeous and weighty with meaning as I’d come to expect. This is probably the sweetest of all his works that I’ve read. The pathos comes in little wavelets and gently tugs at you as the soul-stricken character Mike moves through his grief. He lost his wife and daughter in a car accident. That’s all you need to know. It’s also funny in moments. Johnson writes deliciously about Mike’s experience. It becomes odd towards the end, but I appreciate it all the more for its strangeness. The poet in him is strong in his writing, and his images lit up brilliantly in my mind. So good. I feel clearly that Johnson was doing his own thing, he didn’t seem to follow anything but his own instincts.

I wasn't expecting anything when I read this 129 page book. It looked like it might be easy to get through after reading a Mario Vargas Llosa book that was deeply disturbing. The story of Mike Reed starts off describing the life of a bored history professor at some tiny Midwestern college and his alienated social life among colleagues who are as adrift as he. Around page 100 he connects up with a young artist who tells him a story that jolts him out of his rut and then he's off running. Like Murakami, the novel shifts from one universe to another.

Fragmento de una lucidez sublime sobre la repetición de comportamientos porque nos funcionaron en el pasado y actualmente carecen de frutos. El brillante párrafo que podría considerarse esencia y piedra angular del libro:

«(...) viéndolo desde la perspectiva de una madurez ya avanzada, todo eso acerca de los peligros de imitarse a uno mismo, repitiendo los mismos trucos, aferrándose a rutinas y a ritos mucho después de que hayan dejado de parecernos interesantes y ya no sean ellos los que nos cautivan sino nosotros los que los mantenemos cautivos. Sobre el peligro de esconderse a uno mismo lejos de la vasta náusea de la consciencia de la vida humana».

Up there with Train Dreams, this story sneaks up on you and reels you in with the last 20 pages. It's sweet and sad but not dark like Already Dead and Tree of Smoke which just put me in a bad mood after every reading session. It's the kind of book where nothing much happens for awhile, but the language is beautiful enough to keep you coming back, and you know something has got to give sooner or later, because it's Denis Johnson, and sure enough he fills your heart in just a few poignant closing pages. So far my favorite Johnson books happen to be his novellas: Train Dreams, The Name of the World and Nobody Move.

This novella reads like an extension to Jesus' Son, Johnson's volume of short stories. It is a return to the spiritual geography of the Middle West. The characters are off kilter and damaged--strangers even to themselves. The plot turns more and more unhinged (without feeling too causation dependent). And still, this book made me laugh several times.

One of Johnson's genius strengths is to make very dissimilar themes seem suddenly inseparable. He has a poet's sense of movement, and a child's delight in spontaneity. Simply said, I loved this book. I could hardly put it down. It felt cathartic to read (especially after a first semester of MFA-tion) something so improvisational and fun, and yet the themes are big and suitable anguished. Somehow, I've never found myself feeling jealous of Denis Johnson. He earns every sentiment that he probes in The Name of the World, and line for line the words seem to levitate by strength of their affection for one another. He's cool.

I read this right after "Jesus' Son" which was great. Where did the underbelly-of-society mojo go that he used so well? This is a story about the travails of a non-tenured faculty at a university in the midwest. He lost his wife and daughter and so he's pretty understandably bummed about that. But then he gets full on infatuated with a young art student. Snore. The ending was a huge letdown, especially since this guy really knows how to write and exhibits many clever turns of the phrase. Too bad.

I just finished this. It went quickly because it was so short. It was more like a long short story than a novel. I think what I liked about it was the tone and descriptive writing style. It put lots of images in my head and was sort of like a film in that way. It put me in a weird introspective mood while reading it, but other than that, I wasn't terrible interested in the characters and not much happens. I could have lived my life without reading this, but if you have a few hours to kill and you don't feel like making the commitment to a longer novel, go ahead and pick it up.

Second time reading this novella, and: even better. It's a strange, wonderful book. Strange in that the narrative wanders, Johnson seems merely to be following his narrator, Mike Reed, wherever whim takes him; but where it takes him tends to be interesting (this is Johnson, after all). The novella contains several amazing set pieces: a scene in which Reed follows a much-younger woman he knows only slightly but is fixated on (her name, wait for it, is Flower Cannon) to a religious sing-along that blows Reed's mind -- his soul, really -- and ironically makes him realize, with exhilaration, that there is no God; and a scene, one of the most interesting "almost sex" scenes you'll ever read, in which Reed joins Flower Cannon at her art studio in the basement of a former school. Of course, sentence by sentence, Johnson is the best. Jesus' Son is his masterpiece, Tree of Smoke is second, and his two novellas -- Train Dreams and The Name of the World -- are in close third. What appeals to me about The Name of the World -- over, say, Already Dead -- is that Mike Reed is a somewhat normal man. As much as I love Johnson's writing, he can overpopulate some of his novels (again: Already Dead) with SO many off-kilter characters, weirdos galore, that it can become predictable. Anyway, he's the best.

This was my first Denis Johnson novel -- I thought I'd start with a short one before diving into something like "Tree of Smoke."

It's the story of a burned-out, middle-aged professor at an unnamed Midwestern university still dealing with the loss of his wife and child several years earlier in a car accident. It's not an academic satire, though there are some funny/scathing observations. I was afraid it was going to turn into the cliche of nubile young student banishes demons of schlubby older man through torrid sex (this seems to be so many middle-aged male writers' fantasy), but

-- sort of spoiler --

I was pleasantly surprised that it did not end up that way.

The plot, such as it is, held my interest and the writing is crisp and lively. This is not a grand-scale epic -- it's one man's story, a very human and humane story, and I found myself really caring about what happened to him.

a great short read.

i tended to like the form towards the beginning of the book, where scenes were separated by longish passages of internalization and no indication of a scene change, let alone time passing, was given.

the writing is beautiful, but what i love most is the exactness of his phrasing. maybe exactness isn't the right word, it sounds too sterile, but those moments in johnson's writings are anything but that. still, despite the lyrical, ethereal prose (very, very important to me), there was a lack of something for me, which i am still in the process of trying to figure out.

i mean, there is this quietness in the way the story unravels, or rather the way the character unravels, but not in an overly confessional way, which is good. and i rather liked the last pages of the novel, i liked the way he closed the story, though i'm not sure if i liked, or even got, how the climax worked. maybe a few more days of rolling it over in my head will yield some thoughts of value.

i liked it, but i most definitely did not love it.