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.
