Books like The Name of the World

PointlessThere may be significance to this book but I suspect only for the author. As a fictionalised memoir, it lacks development. As a novel, it has neither plot nor character. It is as flat as the mid-western plains on which it takes place.A middle aged, bereaved husband and father finds some sort of psychic oblivion as a part time university lecturer. The post is apparently a sinecure which allows the author to get in a few digs about government-funded higher education. There are no lectures to give so he simply ruminates - for four years - about his loss. He hates his life and muses “Soon I’d have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.” He’d better because the reader is not going to waste the time.Then, in quick succession, he gets fired, develops an obsessive but abortive relationship with a wild child student who could have been molested at age four, attacks a group of celebrating teenagers, and absconds in a stolen car to Alaska, thus fulfilling his own prophecy earlier in the day: “I needed one more aberration in the round I’d been following, one more liberating aberration, before I broke gently free and continued on a new path. I’d say I was almost conscious of needing it. Almost consciously looking for trouble.” Yep, sure, and... ? Is this a mature man or an errant 16 year old?The level of emotion is something the reader has to take on faith since he shows none. He appears to act out of impulse not feeling. What feelings he has are... well trivial and misplaced. Driving an automobile for the first time since his family had been killed in an accident while driving with a friend, he feels guilt. “I can’t think of any more significant betrayal in my life, that is, any clearer contradicton of a former self, than owning this car after four years’ mourning two victims of a car crash.” What! Guilt about not saying goodbye, or the fight during breakfast, or the hours of overtime at work, one might understand. But driving a car? Hardly.It could be of course that Johnson’s novel is meant as a send-up for the culture in which it is placed, a sentimental but unfeeling culture which doesn’t know a priority from an eggshell, a culture whose individuals are manipulated by circumstances to do bizarre things. If Name of the World is in fact sarcasm masquerading as slice of life rapportage, or some sort of Jungian allegory which completely escapes me, I can only apologise to the author. Otherwise, it is indeed pointless.