AUTHOR'S GOT WHOLE 'WORLD' IN HIS HANDS.

Byline: Bernadette Murphy Correspondent

``The Name of the World''

By Denis Johnson 

120 pages, HarperCollins; $22

Reading Denis Johnson is an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you appreciate the bizarre and, at times, graphically violent story lines he develops and trust him to lead you through his vaporous scenes to the flash of expiation he invariably plants, or you don't.

Those readers who do, like Johnson's walking-wounded characters, are among the lucky few to stumble upon the metaphorical resurrection Johnson favors.

In what arguably might be the best collection of short stories published in the 1990s, ``Jesus' Son'' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992 - released earlier this year as an Alison Maclean film adaptation), for example, Johnson crafts one of the most haunting medleys of outcast misadventures and drug-induced psychosis ever.

The linked stories focus on a dazed, kind-hearted '70s drifter and his tentative shot at redemption. ``Well, maybe I mean alive in a deeper sense,'' the narrator says to another, been-through-the-wringer character he meets in detox, alluding to the kind of sentient life on which Johnson's writing focuses. ``You could be talking, and still not be alive ... .''

Talking and yet not alive aptly describes Michael Reed, a history professor at a Midwestern university in Johnson's newest work, ``The Name of the World.'' Through the course of this slim novel - hardly more than a novella, really - Johnson leaves behind the drugs, shocking violence and wild behavior of his previous work to root Reed's story among the respectable halls of higher learning, in the icy and silent world of emotional death.

``Myself, I continued as I had for years,'' Reed explains his frozen immobility to the reader through the fragile intimacy Johnson's prose creates. ``I showed up where I was invited; I held imaginary conversations with a man named Bill, in which I went over the same ground I'd been going over since the deaths of my wife and daughter.'' Four years after the tragedy that claimed his family, Reed is stuck on a emotional path that goes nowhere.

``While I went around looking paralyzed or detached, my thoughts ripped perpetually around a track like dogs after a mechanized rabbit.'' Could he have stopped the traffic accident if he'd spent a moment or two longer with his family that fateful morning? What would his daughter be like now, had she lived - how would she be maturing? He keeps replaying the details - ``the little dimes, where fate takes its sharpest turns'' - mistaking his paralysis for simple grief. ``But it wasn't simple,'' he tells us.

Reed would probably continue his ghostlike existence if life - fate? - didn't intervene. The university appointment he thought was assured for another year is unexpectedly terminated. Around the same time, he develops his first powerful attraction to a woman since his wife's death, a fascination that stirs up in Reed much that had been dormant. ``Witnessing a talented young person make a slight fool of herself, at a stiff little gathering like this, is so pleasant,'' Reed describes his fist encounter with graduate student Flower Cannon at a strait-laced university dinner where she gets ``attractively tipsy.'' The glacier of his mourning is beginning to thaw.

But Cannon, a red-haired cellist and performance artist who competes in strip tease competitions for extra cash, is more than a tempestuous, intelligent woman to Reed. She reminds him of both his wife and daughter, and in many ways, seems a ghostly reminder of their passing. ``Are you a siren?'' Reed wants to know, so disturbed is he by her presence. ``A witch?''

And Johnson, true to form, gives no clear-cut answer. He sets the scenes by which the sap of life returns to Reed's dormancy and leaves it to the reader to make sense of what he's created. To his credit, the author doesn't give a predictable, love-saves-the-day solution. Rather, he takes us deeper, to a mystical, ineffable realm - the real place where genuine, lasting resurrection occurs.

Like all Johnson's work, ``The Name of the World'' is the kind of book that haunts the imagination. Not so much in what he says, though his prose is poetic, lyrical and stunningly sharp, but in the scenes he creates that replay in one's mind, recalling hints and shadings utterly free of specific conclusions.

For those readers who want a story completely spelled out, who desire crystal-clear resolution and the undeniable sense that good has triumphed over evil, Johnson may not be your author. But for those who content themselves with a mere spark of redemption, who make peace with inklings and wait for the transcendent, Johnson's pronunciation of ``The Name of the World'' will echo in your soul.