SOURCE: Stone, Robert. “In Transit.” New York Times Book Review (9 July 2000): 5.

In the following positive assessment, Stone explores the narrative line of The Name of the World.

The jacket of Denis Johnson's new novel displays what might be a road or a set of railroad tracks disappearing into a whited-out middle distance. The road out of town has always been a major element in Johnson's work. His characters—often drifters, self-educated intellectual outlaws, vagabond poets—take their places beside the Old Highway in the dew-scented dawn or the early morning rain. Down the road ahead they find runic messages, brief encounters charged with elusive significance, random violence, masked providence. The Name of the World is, in some ways, a departure for Johnson in that its protagonist is a relatively solid citizen. Circumstance, however, has rendered him just one more uncertain counter in life's brutal Snakes and Ladders. He...