The Name of the World

What to say? Another great chapter of the greatest american novel in progress. Read it in couple of hours and feels like a whole life. Thank you, Johnson.

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.

Another treasure from a writer who continues to inject hard comedy into his stories of loss and redemption. The only quibbles I have with this novel concern the editing. On the day that Mike Reed follows Flower Cannon, he notes, among other things, that her boots are white. A little later these same boots have changed color to black. Also, Flower mentions that she has two sisters-Daisy and Kali-and that she was seven years old when Kali was born. During her story about her name, Flower recalls events that occurred when she was four years old; yet she distinctly remembers that at that time her mother and her sisters helped her plant tulip bulbs-this despite the fact that Kali hadn't been born yet. Also, Flower talks of celebrating every Fourth of July until '93-a date beyond the action of the book. Finally, that lonesome parenthesis on top of page 111. Denis Johnson is much too good a writer to be allowed into print in this shoddy fashion. I guess what I'm really saying is where the hell is Maxwell Perkins when you need him?

The brief, strange, magical, and moving narrative of a man coming to life again after the death of his wife and daughter four years previously. He comes to understand that the name of the world, and of our lives, is "remakable." Highly recommended.