SOURCE: Review of The Name of the World, by Denis Johnson. Kirkus Reviews 68, no. 10 (15 May 2000): 655.

In the following review, the anonymous critic offers a favorable assessment of The Name of the World.

A traumatized widower is painfully and gradually recalled to life in this deceptively simple—and surprisingly absorbing—short novel [The Name of the World] by the well-known poet and author (Already Dead, 1997, etc.).

Narrator Michael Reed is a freelance writer and teacher of history who's attempting to lose himself in work—and various degrees of intimacy with colleagues (at a nameless Midwestern college where he had recently put down roots) and random acquaintances—after his young wife and small daughter are killed in an automobile accident. Johnson precisely delineates how Michael experiences and absorbs “little” everyday manifestations of survival and commitment—in such nonspecific ephemera as the carnival atmosphere of student life (“whoops and laughter like...