Denis Johnson - The Name of the World

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The acclaimed author of
and
returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel.
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,
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.

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I left the Midwest without goodbyes. For about three months, the rest of that summer and into the fall, I stayed in a converted boat-house in Hyder, Alaska, the state’s southernmost region, a strip of coast that runs alongside British Columbia. I spent the long days reading books and listening to recorded music. I really did almost nothing else. One night about ten, when the colossal red presence of the sunset was crashing into the big studio and I was just bending over the tub and putting the plug in the drain to draw myself a bath, a drop of liquid struck my wrist, and then another. I glanced up to see if some pipe overhead were leaking, and then I felt it: tears running down my cheeks. I slipped to my knees, my head hanging, face lolling into the tub, and rested in that position while I sobbed out loud, bawled and shook like a child all through the hour of sundown until it was dark…When I pulled the light-chain I saw that I’d wept so profusely and for so long that a tiny flood of my own tears, enough to fill a shot glass, had pooled in the drain. I was about to pull the plug when I thought better of it. I turned on the faucet and filled the tub and stripped naked and soaked, exhausted by grief and joy, until my bath was cold.

The next winter I took an assignment to cover the Gulf War. I arrived in Dahran, Saudi Arabia, six days before the U.N. bombing campaign began. Soon Scud missiles began blowing up over the city.

I’ve taken assignments steadily since then. I remain a student of history, more of one than ever, now that our century has torn its way out of its chrysalis and become too beautiful to be examined, too alive to be debated and exploited by played-out intellectuals. The important thing is no longer to predict in what way its grand convulsions might next shake us. Now the important thing is to ride it into the sky.

After three weeks in Dahran I moved to the north, the town of Nuaryriyah. Off and on, for a while, I traveled around the uniform emptiness of the Hijarah Desert interviewing American soldiers at the gates of their encampments. I spent many nights near the Iraqi border sleeping inside my rented Toyota in the middle of a vast waste. The desert trembled with incessant bombing, rumbled so deeply it couldn’t actually be heard. I was there, I felt it, it thudded in the soul. I wore khakis and desert boots and an Australian commando’s hat. My face burned brown in the sun. I was adopted by a group of junior executives (what else to call them? — they were young engineers, computer jocks, even an accountant, from Parker-Boyd, a civilian helicopter-maintenance firm under contract to the military in the Gulf) who erroneously understood me to have permission to travel anywhere in the region. With them and their crews and guards of bulky, invulnerable-looking young Marines I flew in helicopters above blazing tank battles in the desert in the night, through black smoke overclouding a world pocked by burning oil wells like flickering signals of distress, of helplessness, floated like prey in the talons of a hawk above a bare brown planet with nothing in it but two or three roads and a war; and continued day after day in a life I believe to be utterly remarkable.

About the Author

Denis Johnson is the author of 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 awards for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.

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