THE NAME OF THE WORLD is the story of a college professor whose wife and daughter die in an accident four years before we meet him. Michael Reed tells us early on, "Nothing was required of me. I just had to put one foot in front of the other, and one day I'd wander wide enough of my dark cold sun to break gently from my orbit." And that will end what he thinks is his humdrum existence. In this latest novelistic effort from Denis Johnson, not known for his clear and lucid storytelling, a cliche subject is taken to a new level, with the depths of despair for which his other famous work, JESUS' SON, is well-known, but with a compassion that is not usually found in his other work.

Reed meets a woman named Flower Cannon and becomes bewitched with her, this student whose every attempt at living is fraught with the kind of high emotion of which he feels no longer capable. In fact, he begins to wonder if this girl hasn't been sent to him as a specter of his late daughter. The novel then launches into a difficult and imaginary state, not created by the use of drugs as his other characters' endeavors were, but created by the dream world of grief and horror with which he surrounds himself. "To let my wife and child be dead. I didn't think I was cruel enough for that. Because that is what the imperfections in Flower's skin invited me to do. There was a sense in which Anne and Elsie had to be killed, and killing them was up to me." The writing is sketchy and falls into a shambles as Johnson tries desperately to bring us in touch with the anger and horror of Reed's life in its new form.

Johnson, born poet that he is, prefers obscure references to emotional states than straight-arrow discussions of the psychological situations that Reed is passing through on his way to what we hope will be a redemptive period for him. Flower is just something to hitch his wagon to, literally and figuratively, because we never really get to know what kind of person she is inside. All this vagueness may make people think this book is profound, and in moments, it transcends its pomposity and reaches for something real. But, ultimately, I think Johnson is a scaredy-cat writer, a beatnik in sheep's clothing, the kind of writer who wanders around the face of the language map without ever really settling down and telling us everything. THE NAME OF THE WORLD started out fine, interesting, even compelling, but unfortunately, falls flat at the end.