<P>The acclaimed author of <I>Jesus' Son</I> and <I>Already Dead</I> returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. <I>The Name of the World</I> is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him.</P><P>Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances -- he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life -- he's a dead man walking.</P><P>Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent war."</P><P>Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens