There is a kind of radiant prose, sparking in short circuits, that can be achieved only through a point of view that is youthful and stoned:

I stood outside the motel hitchhiking, dressed up in a hurry, shirtless under my jacket, with the wind crying through my earring. A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine.

It was a Polish neighborhood somewhere or other. The Polish neighborhoods have that snow. They have that fruit with the light on it, they have that music you can't find. We ended up in a laundromat, where the guy took off his shirt and put it in a washer.

The sky was a bruised red shot with black, almost exactly the colors of a tattoo. Sunset had two minutes left to live.

These quotations are from Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, a 1992 collection of short stories that was recently made into a motion picture. Though the book is short, it offers a definitive description of a certain world, a drug user's nineteen-seventies world, remembered in an agreeable haze. It calls to mind Jayne Anne Phillips's youthful Black Tickets, and the short stories of Thom Jones and Raymond Carver, though Jones's heroes are more muscular and Carver's less airily down and out than Johnson's, being drunks in various stages of desperation and reform rather than heroin addicts. We are reminded, further, of the gleaming economy and aggressive minimalism of early Hemingway, the Hemingway of In Our Time, with its paragraph-long prose poems sandwiched between stories distinguished by their beautifully bleak language and dialogues of non-connection. Like Hemingway at eighteen, the typical Johnson hero has known death, been in and out of his body, and seen life by an X-raying black light. “Catty-corner from me,” a narrator in Jesus' Son relates, “sat a dear little black child maybe sixteen, all messed up on skag. She couldn't keep her head up. She couldn't stay out of her dreams. She knew: shit, we might as well have been drinking a dog's tears. Nothing mattered except that we were alive.”

Johnson's new novel, The Name of the World, also has the translucent taste of dog's tears, but its hero, Mike Reed, is fifty-three, “baby faced … with cheery blue eyes,” and ensconced in academe. Shakily and marginally ensconced, it is true, as an Adjunct Associate Professor of History, a post that seems to involve little besides a few “small seminars,” rather like Writer in Residence; he is nevertheless tamed by an establishment and subject to its politics. Four years ago, Reed's thirty-four-year-old wife and four-year-old daughter were killed in an auto accident, having accepted a ride from a senile neighbor in the aftermath of an ice storm. Since then, the widower, “virtually dead,” has gone through the motions of living, finding obscure consolation in watching the students skate around and around the pond of his Midwestern university and in pondering the “sorrowful concentricity” of an anonymous slave's drawing in the art museum. “Man is but a reed,” Pascal wrote, “the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” Though Mike Reed is not Jesus' son (a quote from Lou Reed's song “Heroin”), Johnson's eerie clarity of description, with its subtly askew precision, remains:

This day of my visit to the Swan's Grove Campus the weather felt new. Winter's edges had been pushed back, the sidewalks were clear and the roads were dry. The deep snow in the fields had collapsed into dimples that had become, at last, here and there, craters with soaked gray pasture at their bottoms.

Yet the world of a middle-aged academic simply does not yield the numinous dishevellment, the shimmer of blithe violence, common in the surreal milieu of a young addict and odd-jobber. Abrupt and casual auto accidents, a frequent feature of Jesus' Son, have taken on a weight of consequence. After four years of not having a car, Reed gets into a B.M.W. and floors the pedal, but his courtship of a fatal accident ends when, having “worn myself out going too fast,” he pulls over, calms down, drives safely home, and parks the car in his garage. The events of this academic novel flirt with predictability: the faculty scheming, the learned free-loading, the abruptly terminated position, the professor's sexual attraction to a graduate student. The student, bearing the symbolically double-barrelled name of Flower Cannon, pops up variously in Mike Reed's life: as a tipsy, white-shouldered cellist at a faculty dinner party; as an art-department performance artist publicly shaving her public hair; as a college caterer's waitress; as the naked winner of an off-campus dive's Friday dance contest; as a participant in the Sing Night of the Anabaptist Friesland Fellowship; and, finally, in the short novel's longest scene, as a friendly and fey, if elusive, conquest. It is Mike Reed, actually, who does the eluding, fleeing Flower's compliant presence when the memory of his wife and daughter short-circuits his desire.

The author, increasingly authorial and confiding as the book goes on, tells us, “Looking over the pages of this reminiscence, I see I've misled. I've created the impression that what I've been aiming at is the account of a one-night stand, and that the item pending most crucially between Flower and me was my loss of a kind of late-life virginity.” O.K., but if not that, what? Johnson loses us in the later pages, which look back upon his university days from a curious paradise he has found as a journalist during the Gulf War. Flower, though lovingly sculpted, in touch after touch, as the book builds toward their culminating intimacy, melts away, and is retrospectively dismissed in a rude voice: “As for Flower Cannon, I have no idea what's become of her, but if I ever track her down I'm sure she'll be up to something quite shocking and also absolutely no surprise.” Like the feckless, scattered heroes of Jesus' Son, where women are generally bedraggled and ill-used, and like the buzz-brained principals in Johnson's lengthy, witty, and wild exercise in California noir, Already Dead, Mike Reed is too advanced in the school of life to be transformed by a sexual encounter. He is looking for something more, something unnamable. When Flower asks for a phrase in his handwriting, to add to a collection of such phrases she keeps in a wooden box, he pens, “The name of the world.” It gives the novel its title but not, for me, a meaning.

The hero's sense of meaning emerges in his nostalgia for a drug trip's benignly pointless, potentially revelatory confusion. The fondly evoked dives of Jesus' Son have a tame equivalent in a basement tavern in the new novel's university town: “Here I've let my memory veer down the stairs and float alongside the bar and hover in the light of the jukebox, when actually there's no point. Nothing worth telling about happened down there. Or up in the world, for that matter.” Point arrives in the poetic coinages such venues stimulate in Johnson: of a habituée he writes, “Eloise laughed and hacked. She had the smashed sinuses of an English bulldog.” The metaphor is smashing, and Mike Reed comes closest to pleasure in the presence of things being smashed: at the novel's end, the Gulf War has him flying “through black smoke overclouding a world pocked by burning oil wells like flickering signals of distress, of helplessness” and praising this, in an oddly prim phrase, as “a life I believe to be utterly remarkable.”

There is religion in Johnson, a memory of visions. Like Allen Ginsberg's “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” Mike Reed has glimpsed at the world's core a kind of glowing jelly. Formal religious structures and creeds don't hold this jelly but constitute a memorial to it, a vacated tabernacle. At the novel's spiritual climax, Reed has followed Flower to Friesland Sing Night, where the singing is transcendental: “They sang in multiple harmony, in a fullness and with a competence that didn't seem studied, but perfectly natural, innate, all talent. I heard none of the usual bad voices.” In the midst of this music, it comes to our thinking Reed that there is no God:

I didn't think often about that which people called God, but for some time now I'd certainly hated it, this killer, this perpetrator, in whose blank silver eyes nobody was too insignificant, too unremarkable, too innocent and small to be overlooked in the parceling out of tragedy. I'd felt this all-powerful thing as a darkness and weight. Now it had vanished. A tight winding of chains had burst. Someone had unstuck my eyes. A huge ringing in my head had stopped. This is what the grand and lovely multitude of singers did to me.

The moment seems psychologically clear: Reed absolves the depersonalized universe of blame for the deaths of his wife and daughter. He feels his heart “going up and up into an endless interval with nothing to get in the way. All my happy liberated soul came out my throat.” The remaining forty pages, including his long-anticipated tryst with Flower Cannon, are a relative muddle, full of effortful enigmas and presumably pregnant pauses. She comes toward him “carrying her message from a vanished god,” and he says (he thinks), “I still can't feel anything,” a by now rather tired post-Romantic boast that elicits “no response from Flower. Maybe she didn't hear.” Non-response is followed by noncoition; Mike Reed achieves closure by assaulting a car full of teen-age youths, fleeing town, and, as an existential Foreign Legionnaire, joining the Gulf War.

Like the Bible, The Name of the World ends on an apocalyptic note:

Our century 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.

To hope that limited, tactical struggles like the Gulf War are big enough to ride into the sky seems optimistic. Fireworks aren't a spaceship launch. Explosions don't last, and Denis Johnson's radioactive wine holds up best in small bottles, before the decay of rhetoric sets in. This novel about anomic grief thirsts for tears; the hero winds up crying into a bathtub, “a tiny flood of my own tears, enough to fill a shot glass.” He then supplements the tears by turning on the faucet, and bathes “until my bath was cold.” Through a possible short circuit of my own, this bathos left me cold.