Maybe you're already a member of the cult of Denis Johnson, joined when you first read Jesus' Son (coming this month to theaters near you). Then, perhaps, you were grateful when he wrote Already Dead, the funny but not ridiculous portrait of hippies in Northern California. It was so much fun to read. But more important even than fun is that Johnson, in his fiction, makes you nostalgic for something in yourself, some lost country in your soul that you have almost forgotten. Usually, he has the decency to cover up this invasion of your privacy with humor.

But this book is different. The Name of the World reinvents everything, even good manners. The flap copy promises funny, but that's for cowards, God bless 'em. Michael Reed is a professor at a small Midwestern college whose 34-year-old wife and 5-year-old daughter have been killed in a car crash. The novel covers the period, a few years after the initial shock, when Reed tries to find his place again, tries to feel something, anything. “I was grieving for someone who was dead,” he thinks, “and death is such a physical thing. … I didn't want physical things.” He has managed to stave off his grief until a young woman he fancies takes him home and tells him the story of her brief kidnapping when she was 4. Something her kidnapper said to her awakens Reed, and though it makes for a lousy date, it is one of the finest, deepest moments in literature. So large is this scene and so far has Johnson traveled in inner space to write it that it is hard to imagine he will ever fully return.

I sure hope he does, with the movie coming out, but he can't possibly be the same person he was before he wrote The Name of the World. It's a little easier being the reader, the way it always is, and maybe you'll find your way home better than I did. But something will change: You will be lifted up and set back down. How easy it is to forget, with all the trivia in print cluttering our lives, that words can be this supple a vehicle for transcendent healing.