Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Johnson, Denis - Richard Eder (review date 14 July 2000)

Johnson, Denis - Richard Eder (review date 14 July 2000)

Richard Eder (review date 14 July 2000)

SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “The Ever-Widening Circles of Grief.” New York Times (14 July 2000): E37.

[In the following mixed review, Eder discusses the fragmentary nature of The Name of the World and questions the role of deliverance in the novel.]

There are a yellowed globe and an antique telescope in the living room of Ted MacKey, the chairman of the music department at a Midwestern college. They are elements of a mellow scholarly décor in which the guests sip hot buttered rum by a blazing log fire. It is Currier & Ives does academe, or, as Michael, an adjunct professor and the shattered narrator, remarks in The Name of the World, “a very expensive gift shop.”

It is a fine, acid phrase. The décor comes in more suggestively in Michael's comment about some of his older colleagues regularly dusting off “the lectures they'd been dragging out … since the days when Ted...

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