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This title in other editions

eBook editions

The Name of the World

by Denis Johnson

The Name of the World Cover

ISBN13: 9780060929657
ISBN10: 0060929650
Condition: Standard
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Awards

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
A New York Times Notable Book for 2000.
Voted one of the Top Five Novels of 2000 by Salon.com.
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

The acclaimed author of Jesus' Son and Already Dead returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. The Name of the World is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him.

Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances — he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life — he's a dead man walking.

Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent war."

Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens to him." Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, "by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror," he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth.

Elegant and incisively observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today.

Review:

"To put the matter simply, Denis Johnson is one of the best and most compelling novelist in the nation." Elle

Review:

"Denis Johnson's topsy-turvy novella pulls with G-force....The book's headlong momentum may thrust you back against your chair for its whole 129-page run." Newsweek

Review:

"Concerned with sorrow and the task of continuing in a world riven with loss, where perfection always decays, The Name of the World is still often shrewd and funny....Johnson is the kind of writer who's so good you don't notice how good he is. There's no effort to reading this novel — it just sort of slips in, less like reading than breathing in the cool dry air of winter." Laura Miller, Salon.com

Review:

"The events of this academic novel flirt with predictability: the faculty scheming, the learned freeloading, the abruptly terminated position, the professor's sexual attraction to a graduate student....Explosions don't last, and Denis Johnson's radioactive wine holds up best in small bottles, before the decay of rhetoric sets in. this novel about anomic grief thirsts for tears...." John Updike, The New Yorker

Review:

"How easy it is to forget, with all the trivia in print cluttering our lives, that words can be this supple a vehicle for transcendent healing." Los Angeles Times Book Review

Review:

"Denis Johnson is one of the few American writers who could legitimately be said to possess a visionary sensibility, a nearly Blakean appreciation of the territory of the human soul." Newsday

Review:

"Johnson's prose conjures up a world that is as tangible as it is magical. He is an utterly brilliant and original talent, a novelist who reminds us just how wonderful fiction can be." Philadelphia Inquirer

Synopsis:

In this elegant and incisively observed book, Johnson, author of Jesus' Son, tells the story of a soul-dead academic who makes unexpected contact with ahost of characters in his small university town.
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About the Author

Denis Johnson is the author of The Name of the World, Already Dead, Jesus' Son, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, and Angels. His poetry has been collected in the volume The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.
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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
OneMansView, February 8, 2010 (view all comments by OneMansView)
A strange summer indeed (3.5 *s)

This very short novel is a reminiscence by now journalist Michael Reed in the early 1990s of an eventful, disjointed, and bizarre summer of a few years before at the age of fifty-three, when he was ending a desultory few years as a history instructor at an obscure mid-Western college. He had been a high school teacher and a high-level political aid to a Washington politician before a devastating tragedy struck his family with both his wife and only daughter being killed in a traffic accident on icy roads.

Seldom does one find a character so detached from reality, living life in a perpetual fog, who manages to hold on to sufficient normalcy. But then again, his disengagement does not go unnoticed. In his fourth year at the college, he knows that he will not be retained. For one, he avoids departmental politics, as he usually fails to attend the monthly coffee klatches. In addition, a colleague, nearly crazy, has achieved some notoriety and must therefore be retained at his expense. At the last coffee, which he barely makes, he learns that the gathering is in his honor, celebrating his departure – a heartless manner of dismissal though accepted with equanimity.

In his last few weeks in the college town, his behavior tends toward the unpredictable and reckless as he finds himself in new places where he encounters others, mostly academics, in some form of distress. He manages to get himself punched in a gambling casino by a person he met just hours before, and if that were not enough, he invites the repercussions of taunting a carload of boys with nothing better to do than respond. The most interesting person he meets is the mysterious Flower Cannon, a twenty-something, red-head artistic type who seems to turn up wherever Michael goes. She has a strange predilection for going sans-clothing and giving public performances on shaving in nether regions of her body, in addition to her other talents of painting, playing the cello, catering faculty meetings, etc. Michael is both drawn to her and repelled as eerie connections with his departed daughter are suggested when she explains the origin of her name.

The book is not without its appeal. There is an unusual combination of bizarreness, starkness, and grittiness that commands attention. And there are any number of astute observations delivered by Michael in his contemplations of his life and surroundings. Yet one does have to contend with a story that is more than a little uneven that largely occurs in a pervasive haze. Michael’s dealings with Flower are a nagging loose end.
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rabbitrabbitz, April 12, 2008 (view all comments by rabbitrabbitz)
The protagonist & situation may seem somewhat stale initially, but there is something very compelling in Johnson's writing (the beautiful language?) that keeps the reader willing to go on; eventually the premise becomes credible and even mesmerizing.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780060929657
Author:
Johnson, Denis
Publisher:
Harper Perennial
Author:
by Denis Johnson
Subject:
General
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Psychological fiction
Subject:
Middle west
Subject:
College teachers
Subject:
Loss (psychology)
Subject:
Widowers
Subject:
Loss
Subject:
General Fiction
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Subject:
Literary
Copyright:
2000
Edition Description:
Trade PB
Binding:
TRADE PAPER
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
144
Dimensions:
5-5/16 X 8
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Related Aisles

The Name of the World Used Trade Paper
0 stars - 0 reviews
$7.50 In Stock
Product details 144 pages Perennial - English 9780060929657 Reviews:
"Review" by , "To put the matter simply, Denis Johnson is one of the best and most compelling novelist in the nation."
"Review" by , "Denis Johnson's topsy-turvy novella pulls with G-force....The book's headlong momentum may thrust you back against your chair for its whole 129-page run."
"Review" by , "Concerned with sorrow and the task of continuing in a world riven with loss, where perfection always decays, The Name of the World is still often shrewd and funny....Johnson is the kind of writer who's so good you don't notice how good he is. There's no effort to reading this novel — it just sort of slips in, less like reading than breathing in the cool dry air of winter."
"Review" by , "The events of this academic novel flirt with predictability: the faculty scheming, the learned freeloading, the abruptly terminated position, the professor's sexual attraction to a graduate student....Explosions don't last, and Denis Johnson's radioactive wine holds up best in small bottles, before the decay of rhetoric sets in. this novel about anomic grief thirsts for tears...."
"Review" by , "How easy it is to forget, with all the trivia in print cluttering our lives, that words can be this supple a vehicle for transcendent healing."
"Review" by , "Denis Johnson is one of the few American writers who could legitimately be said to possess a visionary sensibility, a nearly Blakean appreciation of the territory of the human soul."
"Review" by , "Johnson's prose conjures up a world that is as tangible as it is magical. He is an utterly brilliant and original talent, a novelist who reminds us just how wonderful fiction can be."
"Synopsis" by , In this elegant and incisively observed book, Johnson, author of Jesus' Son, tells the story of a soul-dead academic who makes unexpected contact with ahost of characters in his small university town.
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