Michael Reed is not having a routine breakdown; he is caught in a state of suspended animation. Although he describes everything he does, which is relatively little, and everyone he meets - even the trauma patient walking with his arm held over his head - with an elaborate attention to detail, he is not really living, merely passively experiencing.
Denis Johnson is a poet of surreal, almost dangerous clarity with a sharp ear for dialogue and his fiction is about strange states of mind. This extraordinary new novel, narrated as a monologue, builds on the bizarre worlds so brilliantly chronicled in previous works such as Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991) and the even more menacing Jesus' Son (1993), a violently offbeat sequence of ten narratives related by a young drug addict in various moods, from near to complete, anarchy. The Name of the World, shortlisted for this year's Irish Times International Fiction Prize is even more unsettling than those books as the narrator is a middle-aged man who draws in the reader by initially confessing to having always had a liking for the "sweetness" of college life as depicted in old movies.
He deftly conjures up images of young people safely ensconced in the comfort of their professor's aromatic pipe tobacco. It all seems simple nostalgia but within a couple of paragraphs he is explaining how that life came to be his only when he was approaching fifty. He'd arrived there having taught high school and then having spent "nearly twelve years in Washington" as a speech writer and general backroom boy. His academic career appears to have consisted of mainly moving on from one low-powered appointment to another, but he's not complaining. He is at the stage when every supper invitation is accepted on the basis of the part it might play in securing his next job.
Still, he likes his world - precarious though it is. "I like being around people who like being where they are. In the scholarly world, the world of the mind, much more than in the world of politics, it's common to meet people who've truly earned their comfort, at least in a sense, having laboured through and left behind the parts of childhood so unpleasant for scholars, brains and intellectuals." From the earliest passages, the narrator, while able to articulate the most obscure sensations, makes it clear he has no idea of what he is doing, nor does he claim to understand the intentions of anyone else either. This is the same tone of honest bewilderment that dominates the chaotic and deliberate black comedy of Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.
Yet where that third person narrative was sustained from the outset by an offbeat weirdness worthy of film maker David Lynch - in a hospital emergency scene, a clerk is heard shouting down the phone to an injured person, "You're going to live forever" - this new novel quickly develops into a candid, quasi-tragic prose poem. Reed tells his own story and is obviously suffering from an acute form of passive displacement. Whereas Leonard English, the central character in the earlier book, is presented to us as a survivor of a recent suicide attempt who is now searching for some kind of salvation, and who only secures it through confirming the successful suicide of a missing man, Reed is different.
He seems content to slide, accepts his ineffectualness, is well aware he is no more than a witness to events around him, and carefully records how he drifts out of explaining his intentions to a professor who has sufficient influence to help him towards his next appointment. Instead Reed concentrates on observing a young woman attempting to impose herself on the supper party. Her antics are welcomed by him. "I'm not sure why it is that the experience of witnessing a talented young person make a slight fool of herself, at a stiff little gathering like this, is so pleasant, But as she began to draw the focus to our corner of the table . . . I sensed my own spiel would be forgotten, and I wasn't entirely sorry for the fact."
Unlike English, who becomes determined to win the affections of a young woman who assures him she is gay, Reed has no ambitions. He is so apathetic that on referring to himself as "recently widowed", he then prepares to elaborate in a strangely disengaged way. "When I say recently, I don't mean it in the sense that I might have bought a car recently, or seen a movie recently. I'm speaking as I'd speak about the recent change in the earth's climate, or the recent war, the recent - I think that's clear enough. It had been nearly four years . . ." Reed's candour provides the narrative's dynamic. The death of his wife and small daughter have devastated him but the true relevance of his loss, as Johnson powerfully emphasises, is the way in which the event has rendered him irrelevant to himself as well as everyone else.
Leonard English is also drifting but at least he makes decisions, if only to stay on in a bar drinking because "he was drawn into a conversation with a man whose face got to look more and more like a dead pig's face in the dim red light". Reed's interest in the blatant young female at the supper party whose initial impact on him is intensified through a random sequence of sightings, a couple of which reveal her to be a serial exhibitionist, is at once pathetic and moving.
Johnson's limpid relentlessness in the shaping of his narrator's story is unnervingly effective. The more disengaged Reed appears - "Myself, I continued as I had for years, I showed up where I was invited" - the more likely he seems to be approaching either a major breakdown or self defining act of salvation.
There are moments of staggering clarity, such as when Reed admits to having imaginary conversations with Bill the museum guard, or when he reports, "While I went around looking paralysed or detached, my thoughts ripped perpetually around a track like dogs after a mechanized rabbit". Given to watching the students skating on a pond, he likens their actions to his efforts at understanding his situation. "I myself was hunched like a skater, still gripping the rail, and I was filled, suddenly, with a sense of rightness and truth - flooded and becalmed in the wake of an insight: I recognized that every one of these skaters wore my face."
Johnson writes with surreal lyric precision. In Reed he has created a strange, sympathetic character at once annihilated and engaged in reconstruction. This is an existentialist novel carefully de-constructed and relieved of fake intellectualism. Instead Reed is real, and never more real than when, in contrast to his inconclusive fumbling with the zany Flower Cannon, he responds with a manic rage to a stupid incident with some college kids on a spree.
As a confession, as a journey, as the story of one man's passage towards flight, Johnson's finest performance to date is original, unsettling and too close for comfort.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
