The Name of the World by Denis Johnson

What brought Flower Cannon to mind right then I don't know, but I have to say that the passing parade put my recent experiences with her into a kind of perspective. The experiences were mostly about seeing her, laying eyes on her--not about hearing her words, certainly not about touching her. And now I think this narrative might cohere, if I ask you to fix it with this vision: luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowing vagueness. The difference being that I didn't take Flower for a message, but a ghost, the ghost of my daughter--yes, and for a while  she came and went in the flow of events like my Elsie in the silent cataract of memory.

Michael Reed is an academic at one of those huge frosty schools in the American Midwest. His life is, as for all academics, fairly banal, except that he's haunted by the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash several years back. Wherever he goes, he seems to confront symbols of his own life in the wake of their death: the painting in the art gallery that makes concentric shapes, each one becoming more perverse; the students ice-skating around the unreachable monolith on the campus rink. Reed's life is like that, moving around the fundamental absence of his family, never able to break free and form a new trajectory. In his final year at the college, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful red-headed cellist who may offer him the key to a way of living again.

Written plainly, it sounds like an eye-roller: middle-aged academic finds new life in an affair with a beautiful young student. It's what BlueSky Y.A. mavens think all "classic" fiction is like. And there are some elements of that, in fact. Yet, Michael and the absurdly named Flower Cannon never sleep together, though he does see her naked twice: once, in an artsy "performance piece" where she shaves her mons pubis, and again in a racy strip contest at a local casino. (The satire on the academy and modern art that juxtaposition makes isn't exactly subtle.) But more interesting still is the slippage of Michael's attitude toward Flower, who reminds him at times of his wife, at other times his daughter, or someone he would have liked his daughter to grow up into. The Y.A. mavens might object at how available Flower is to the older, homely (self-described) Michael, and how easily Johnson associates her sexiness with mystery and healing. But I was really struck by the strange story that Flower tells about why she's so open to Michael hanging around, in which she tells him that he reminds her of a strange man who kidnapped her when she was young. It's so weird and difficult to integrate into the novel that it seemed like an acknowledgement that Flower Cannon is no archetype but a person with a strange and luminous life of her own.

This felt like a strange sort of novel for Johnson. His work, it seems to me, often focuses on precarity: the precarious lives of the poor and addicted, or the precarity of spies whose are always gambling with their life or safety. His characters always seem to live well outside the margins of ordinary society--a description that might even take in the post-apocalyptic strivers of Fiskadoro or the rustic hermit of Train Dreams. Compared to the protagonists of those other novels, Michael Reed is frustratingly ordinary, and it's possible to read The Name of the World as a novel by a guy who got so comfortable in the world of academia that he found himself detached from the worlds he once thought important to put down on the page. (OK, I guess being an academic is also quite precarious these days, but that isn't quite what I mean, either.) But Johnson writes about grief in ways that feel devastating and true, and quite different than the ordinary bromides one gets, and so in that way The Name of the World is a reminder of the ways that deep interior experiences, too, can put us outside the common life. And of course, with Johnson there are always the sentences, the incredible sentences.