SOURCE: “Perfect Pitch.” Economist (15 July 2000): S12.

In the following review, the anonymous critic lauds the tone and pace of The Name of the World.

It isn't easy to recommend spending ＄23 on 120 widely spaced pages, but there's a reason why literature is not sold by the kilo. In his ninth novel [The Name of the World], Denis Johnson purposefully takes on a slight plot, or what would seem slight, unless it happened to you. Having wandered from high-school teaching to senatorial speech-writing, in late middle age the narrator, Michael Reed, has forsaken Washington for the comfortably meaningless confines of an unremarkable, nameless Midwestern college.

Four years before, his younger wife and only child were killed in a car crash. In consequence, his attachments to the world have come unglued. The accident's specifics were unexceptional: Michael had entrusted his family to the care of a frail, elderly driver. Yet his...