<![CDATA[The Name of the World]]>

false <![CDATA[The Name of the World]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166109957m/9910.jpg 9910 9 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 12666 2000 The Name of the World total:534|5:75|4:181|3:181|2:82|1:15| 534 1821 675 53 4 2 false false Sun Jan 18 19:45:20 -0800 2009 Mon Feb 09 22:00:17 -0800 2009 more...]]> 3 1 false false Thu Nov 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Fri Nov 09 06:20:23 -0800 2007 Mon Nov 12 12:04:45 -0800 2007
that said, the final flower cannon scene in the book is a ...more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Apr 21 16:28:57 -0700 2009 Tue Apr 21 16:28:57 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Feb 28 12:14:44 -0800 2009 Sat Feb 28 13:54:22 -0800 2009
I also can't remember how this book fell into my hands - I think I just want...more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Jun 06 20:55:49 -0700 2009 Sun Jun 07 20:40:09 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Fri Jan 16 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Jan 13 21:46:45 -0800 2009 Fri Jan 16 08:13:08 -0800 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Wed Jul 25 12:33:50 -0700 2007 Sun Aug 12 11:16:47 -0700 2007
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 exa...more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue Feb 26 10:34:47 -0800 2008 Tue Feb 26 10:51:05 -0800 2008 more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Jul 20 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 23 09:38:37 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 23 09:42:23 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Nov 21 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Nov 16 16:38:22 -0800 2009 Sat Nov 21 22:31:48 -0800 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Tue Jun 10 00:00:00 -0700 2003 Tue Aug 11 07:17:17 -0700 2009 Tue Aug 11 07:17:45 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Sun Sep 06 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Sep 08 21:49:44 -0700 2009 Tue Sep 08 21:55:00 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Tue Nov 03 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Oct 18 08:09:42 -0700 2009 Wed Nov 04 08:44:33 -0800 2009
Johnson wrote all the right things, they just lacked any kind of depth or resonance. I never really felt like I could trust the narrator...more...]]> 5 0 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2002 Thu Oct 08 09:32:44 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 08 09:32:44 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Thu Oct 15 08:59:27 -0700 2009 Thu Oct 15 09:01:10 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Tue Mar 03 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Mar 17 09:40:11 -0700 2009 Wed Apr 29 06:01:34 -0700 2009
I've had a hard time getting into Denis Johnson's TREE OF SMOKE, so I picked this up instead. A slim, very focused (single protagonist, single setting, short period of time) novella-ish novel. Johnson's writin...more...]]> 4 0 false false Sat Apr 20 00:00:00 -0700 2002 Wed May 27 07:19:48 -0700 2009 Wed May 27 07:20:36 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Thu Oct 23 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu Oct 23 11:16:27 -0700 2008 Fri Oct 24 09:14:15 -0700 2008
It's the story of a broken man, who knows that he is broken...more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2006 Wed Feb 18 22:23:44 -0800 2009 Wed Feb 18 22:24:56 -0800 2009 5 0 false false Sat Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon May 18 20:06:43 -0700 2009 Sat Aug 15 21:56:02 -0700 2009 more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=9910