SOURCE: Malin, Irving. Review of The Name of the World, by Denis Johnson. Review of Contemporary Fiction 21, no. 1 (spring 2001): 201-02.

In the following review, Malin discusses the role of spirituality in The Name of the World.

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 [The Name of the World] 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...