The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Name of the World by Denis JohnsonIrving Malin
Denis Johnson. The Name of the World. Harper Collins, 2000. 129 pp. $21.00.
Denis Johnson is haunted by the ghostly remains of the Catholicism he once accepted. He writes about lost souls who cannot accept heaven or earth, and he recounts their desperate wanderings and longings in a visionary style. The narrator of this stunning novella is a middle-aged widower. He cannot stop thinking of the accident that killed his wife and children. He lives (or tries to) in the academic world, but he cannot accept its abstract, secular, meaningless rituals and conventions. So instead, he tries to find solace in strip clubs, in imaginary conversations with the guard of a museum, and in a music student, Flower Cannon, who both strips and plays cello. He returns obsessively to a painting. He looks at the youthful skaters and yearns for their perfect movements. In the last two pages we learn that the events the narrator has described so vividly occurred in the past. He is now a journalist covering the insanity of the Gulf War. He has found a kind of perverse salvation in the vast wastes of the desert. The last sentence describes his ascent in helicopters above blazing tank battles—the vantage offers him a view of “the world pocked by burning oil wells like flickering signals of distress, of helplessness.” The ending is, of course, ambiguous. Has the narrator finally found significance in his overview of the wasteland? Is he capable of naming the world? Or is he merely a victim of the fiendish, nameless delusions which have finally abused him? The novella, like Wise Blood or The Moviegoer, marries religion and madness. It offers inexplicable solutions, and confirms Johnson’s angelic/demonic talent. [Irving Malin]