Short Story Criticism | Johnson, Denis - David Gates (review date 31 July 2000)

David Gates (review date 31 July 2000)

SOURCE: Gates, David. “What's in a Name?” Newsweek CXXXVI, no. 5 (31 July 2000): 64.

[In the following review, Gates offers a favorable assessment of The Name of the World.]

Near the end of Denis Johnson's haunting novella, The Name of the World, the narrator says an odd thing. Our century, he says, “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.” I've read this book three times, with my played-out intellect cranked up to 10, and I still can't exactly say what this has to do with the story of a man in free-fall since losing his wife and young daughter in a car crash. A metaphor for how he might get on with his own life? But it also sounds...

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