Resuscitation of a Hanged Man: A Novel

Despite the touches of humor--which are really funny, this is a anything but a light read. I didn't give it that last star because there were numbers of times when I thought I would not be able to read another depressing sentence. I mean dark to the point that I probably would have stopped reading were it not for a book club. At least one member of our group didn't finish the book for this reason. For me, that would have been a mistake, though, because it really is a well-written book that brings up issues I continue to think about a month after reading it. Unfortunately, my book club seldom has the kinds of in-depth discussion I would need to get the most out of this book.

Having learned a little about his bio, 'Hanged Man fits well within Johnson's wheel-house. No real departures here, but that's okay. It works and the novel feels appropriately sized. As a person who finds brevity important, I appreciated that. Beautiful and deranged. Johnson doing his thing.

Classic early Denis Johnson. Beautiful, engrossing, and excellent.

I rarely fail to finish a novel, but I gave up on this one halfway through. It began well, but as it became increasingly dark and surreal, I could no longer recognize any similarity between the writing and what life seems to me to be like, either symbolically or literally.

I've read two other Denis Johnson books - JESUS' SON and TREE OF SMOKE, both excellent. RESUSCITATION OF A HANGED MAN, probably one of his lesser known works, is a decidedly different kinda animal. It gives us the story of thirty-ish Lennie English, who arrives in Provincetown on Cape Cod in the winter of 1980, driving up from Kansas, where he recently attempted to hang himself, obviously unsuccessfully (or maybe not). Yeah, it's THAT strange. A mix of lapsed Catholicism, detective story, sexual intrigue and kinkiness, right wing paramilitary groups, etc. - all that stuff is in here. As English tries to start his life anew, he finds work as a Radio DJ and tech, AND as assistant to a retired cop/private investigator (who also owns the radio station). And he falls in love with Leanna, a gay - or bisexual - woman, who actually gives him a tumble.Lennie finds himself descending by stages deeper and deeper into apparent insanity. After a conversation with a radio guest who does 'auras,' for example, Lennie learns he has a 'golden' aura, and considers -"... it was ridiculous that anyone would go around imagining a golden light shining out of his chest. But he knew he'd probably start doing it."Because of Lennie's tortured relationship with his Catholic faith, one can't help but think of the usual Catholic images of Jesus and His glowing Sacred Heart.And later, as his uneasiness and madness grow, Lennie tries to write a note to Leanna, saying -"Many of the feelings I've been having lately, breaking down and crying when alone, the sense of a cloud between me and God, the intuition that now, behind the cloud, is the time of faith ..."The story culminates in the spring and early summer, as Lennie tries to track down a missing person, traveling up into New Hampshire and back, continuing to unravel mentally and emotionally all the way. He arrives back in Provincetown just as the summer season is beginning, filling the town with hordes of colorful gays and transvestites. Donning some of Leanna's clothes, he joins the parade, but with a very dark purpose, as the story rushes toward its page-turning climax and denouement.I am still puzzling over the final pages, and probably will for some time, but I was caught up by this book, and am so sad that Denis Johnson is no longer with us. But I know there is a new posthumous story collection due out this Spring, and I will definitely be reading it. This book? Excellent. I loved it!- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

I have tried several other Johnson novels, and this is without question his best. The only thing that compares to it is Jesus' Son, the short story collection. Still, for my money, this is not only Johnson's best book, it is one of the 20th century's greatest novels. Superficially, the story is an utterly pessimistic novel lacking any moral center, the sort of novel that the late John Gardner might have condemned, along with so much contemporary American fiction, as "cynical and escapist." The novel traces the protagonist, Leonard English, from his arrival in Provincetown, where he attempts to start over after a botched suicide attempt, to his ultimate mental breakdown in the end.But we can't understand whether a work of fiction has a moral center until we understand what the writer is trying to do. Having read this novel more than once, it became clear that it is entirely allegorical. Earthly life is presented as a purgatory, with Leonard English as an Anglo-Saxon Everyman. Johnson said in a 2000 interview that he sees himself as a Christian writer, although he regrets his readers don't see him as such. One must be always be careful not to assume a character's views represent the author's views. This is even more the case where the viewpoint character, as here, is mentally unstable. Therefore, although superficially it may appear this novel has no moral center, if we look deeper, this view is unsustainable.English is the moral center, if a very imperfect and broken one; and despite his problems, he has a sense of morality and ethics. He has compassion. His tragic flaw is he lacks the discipline and determination to settle down into a spiritual practice that can help him overcome his overwhelming sense of alienation. He takes the phenomenal world as Truth rather than seeing it as the distorted product of his own deluded, vexed egoic mind.English is a protagonist in the anti-hero tradition, an outsider who struggles with faith and redemption in a topsy-turvy world. Upon first reading it, I loved Johnson's vision of this alienated misfit at the extremity of North America, geographically and psychologically (Provincetown), a man whose alienation appears to be not just social but cosmic. His struggle to find a meaning in life is itself a sort of quest with an implicit ethic. If his quest ultimately leads to a psychic disintegration, if he cannot distinguish faith from madness, it is not necessarily a reflection of Johnson's embrace of nihilism. In fact, Leonard English is often appalled at the immorality around him, even while he feels enmeshed in it. Society is full of banal evil. An example is the shown when English and his fellows at Minotaur Systems torture dogs to test their surgical devices.Outside the torture chamber one gets a glimpse of English's view of an utterly Fallen, sick world: Outside, "the grasses no longer seemed to lie down in the wind, but cringed before the sexual approach of something ultimate. Like a long curse a jet's sound passed close above the building toward the horizon. That an airport could go about its gigantic business in the same world as this laboratory seemed impossible, unless--and he didn't think this so much as feel it as a self-evident fact--unless all things conspired consciously to do perfect evil." (34-5)But let me talk about this as a writer, because I could write ten pages as a literary critic. The opening is effective inasmuch as it accomplishes at least a couple things while being interesting: (1) it involves us immediately in a scene, which arouses our interest; and (2) our first view of English shows him getting drunk and crashing his car -- the crash will later seem emblematic of the lurching quality of English's life and of his inescapable sense of the universe as ultimately ruled by chance. There is also a bit of wordplay in the first lines which aptly symbolize English's imbalanced mental state:"He came there in the off-season. So much was off. All bets were off. The last deal was off. His timing was off, or he wouldn't have come here at this moment, and also every second arc lamp along the peninsular highway was switched off. He'd been through several states along the turnpikes, through weary tollgates and stained mechanical restaurants, and by now he felt as if he'd crossed a hostile foreign land to reach this fog with nobody in it, only yellow lights blinking and yellow signs wandering past the car's windows silently."He crashes his car, and then catches a cab toward his destination at the Cape. In this little scene in the cab, the cab driver lights a joint and offers Leonard a toke. English declines. "Grass makes me feel kind of paranoid." There follows an interesting series of assertions on the part of the driver which to English are demonstrably false. This emphasizes how often what people say is at odds with reality, and it emphasizes as well English's sense of being on-his-own, unable to rely on others."I don't get paranoid," the driver said. But he was a paranoid personality if English had ever seen one. "This beyond here, this is absolutely black," the driver said, pointing with the glowing end of his reefer ahead, to where the four-lane highway turned two-way. "No more lights, no more houses"--he drew a chest-ful of smoke--"nuthin, nuthin, nuthin. We won't see no traffic. Not car one." Immediately the red taillights of another car shone ahead. "I think I know this guy." He stomped the gas. "I think this is Danny Moss"--pronounced Dyany Mwas--"this is a Toyota? Cheez, looka how fast this guy's running." They were doing eighty. "We're gonna catch you, Danny. We're gaining on this sucker." But they were falling behind. [6]It is an odd technique, like so many fictional techniques, not, strictly speaking, "realistic," but somehow, it works. I think it works by creating a tension, however subtle. Conflict is said to be the essence of drama. It subtly surprises the reader to have this driver say things which are patently untrue. But because he is smoking dope, it is believable enough.The novel is divided into four sections: 1980, 1981, May-June and Last Days. Not until 13 pages into the novel do we get any real background on English as a character. Then we learn that over a year ago he gave up his job as a medical equipment salesman. He'd taken a vacation during which he tried unsuccessfully to hang himself, extended it with medical leave, then been let go. He has come to Provincetown to start over, having been offered a job as part-time DJ and assistant investigator for the owner of a radio station and detective agency.The delay in exposition about English's life situation is effective because it presents us with Leonard English, dramatically, rather than merely telling us about him. Johnson could have characterized English far more economically by simply writing:"English had a discombobulated, anomic view of life, and inwardly suspected he was no more than a random blob of protoplasm in a meaningless and vaguely sinister universe."And, in fact, some writers can get away with expository openings which introduce protagonists. But it risks losing readers because it is so literal. Instead of expositional characterization, we are first introduced to a policeman who seems, dimly, to be gay; next we observe a cab driver who believes in flying saucers and extraterrestrial star-wanderers who mated with monkeys to produce human beings, and has an apocalyptic vision of a future global cataclysm. Later, English goes to Mass, hoping to confess and gain absolution for attempting to kill himself. But when confronted with the priest, he finds himself wanting to dispense with the formalities of confession and simply be allowed to take Communion. Instead he finds the priest resistant. English abruptly leaves the confessional.What we have are fully four scenes before any exposition on English's background: the opening scene of the car crash and the officer who "with a certain vague tenderness" applies a Band-Aid to English's forehead; the scene in the car and restaurant with the cab driver, and his discombobulated worldview; and the cheap rooming house scene, where Phil, the cab driver, takes him; and the church scene, in which English first abortively attempts to confess, and later attends mass. The scenes all, in a way, characterize English. They all represent his life situation, his "problem," as it were. They point to a life characterized by accidents; a society full of anomie (Provincetown is notorious for its elastic sexual customs); a sense of an impending apocalyptic future (noted by Phil, but later echoed in the flashback to English's involvement in torturous experiments on dogs, p. 34); and then, at Mass, where English, after being unable to confess due to his resistance to all the ritualistic rigamarole, sees the priest as a "Silly Mister Nobody," i.e., not very believable. English appears to be struggling, yet unable, to believe in the sense and sensibility of his Catholic upbringing.At first, English is aroused during his first detective assignment, taping and viewing Marla Baker and Leanna Sousa from a tree out in Sousa's front yard. Yet he has doubts about the ethical nature of his work, telling himself he will quit tomorrow. But then he gets hooked by all the gadgetry, and by a peculiar sense of identification with the lesbians.. . . He felt, sometimes, that in hearing these most private revelations, these things lovers said to one another when they were alone, he'd found the source of a priestly serenity. Listen, he wanted to say, I don't judge you. You comfort me, whatever you do, arguing, lying, making stupid jokes. However small you are, however selfish, I'm there, too. That's me. I'm with you."A moral perspective is presented, even as English finds himself engaging in a morally questionable practice. There is also an almost god-like sense of omniscience to these passages, as if at some level English enjoys playing god, in a voyeuristic sense but also in an almost spiritual sense. Yet there is also a pathetic sense of hopeless estrangement in his ironic "I'm with you" when in fact he is sitting outside in tree, surreptitiously listening in.English is a sort of Everyman figure. He struggles to find a moral center to the universe and to have faith in that. If he is unsuccessful in that quest, we cannot thereby fairly accuse him of lacking compassion or morality. He thought he might as well. "There's really only one question.""What's that?" "Did God really kill Himself?" Leanna wasn't smiling now. She was staring at him, but softly. "Who are you?" she asked him. Whatever she meant by the question, he didn't want to answer it. He wiped his face with his napkin, and in reference to the warmth of the place said, "Man." (43)When English watches two boys going home late from school and talking about Halloween, one of them pantomiming an enormous pumpkin, English is oddly effected: [H]e was amused and heartbroken, watching this kid posing like a ballerina, making a circle the size of a lonely vegetable with his empty arms. The wind blew out to sea, and the air was cold and fresh and so vacant that every object, even the pumpkin that wasn't really there, stood out boldly and seemed to mean something. You are here, he said to God, and then from nowhere came the hope that he was wrong, that the grain of wooden phone poles and the rough stones of the courthouse were taking place on their own, and that nothing would ever be asked of him (74).The novel is delightful, funny and sad at the same time. The key to understanding it is to recognize that it is allegorical. Johnson is a Christian writer, presenting the fate of man in purgatory. Dante wrote that hell is separation from God. The same may be said for purgatory. English is a Anglo-Saxon Everyman, a seeringly honest portrait of the depths of despair to which the ego of man descends when he is ignorant of his true nature and his unity with the Divine. To the ego in extremis, indeed, very little about this world makes sense, and evil does seem to be in command, while doubt, despair and confusion seem like natural and inevitable conclusions to draw from experience. But in laughing at English's foibles and follies, we laugh in turn at our own, seeing our own egocentric illusions in more extreme form in him. Once we see the story as a cautionary allegorical tale, we realize it contains deep spiritual lessons.

Johnson's rootless hero has come to live in a nightmarish seaside town in winter. Though a good part of the nightmare is in his head, not all of it is. This is a place people run away to, and he has come to work here as a clueless private investigator. His investigation is also a quest for religious meaning in the world, and for redemption. Both of these he finds, in a way, as he finds his quarries. He also goes mad, but some of his delusions perhaps accord with reality, perhaps are even helpful. This is melodramatic material, but Johnson's tone is serious, funny and intelligent, and anarchic. He is also a very enjoyable writer, a grat discovery for me, and I shall read all his books.

This book would provide a wonderful introduction to the world of Denis Johnson- it takes in a noir-thriller atmosphere. There are dead ends and Kafkaesque-abductions. There is mistaken love & inter-gender confusion. There is a missing person. There is a suicidal private detective & stalking as a form of love. There is a whole lot more- and a brilliant denoument.Read this book, to prepare you for the Nietzschean opus 'Already Dead' (a Californian Gothic). Though the collection of short-stories 'Jesus' Son' & the novella 'The Name of the World' are also equally excellent (if not better).Read this book; what more can I say?

'Resusication of a hanged Man' is where Johnson took the bleak outlook of 'Angels' and applied it to the noir tradition...This book is as readable as Chandler or Hammett, and is a bit like Elmore Leonard (if he didn't let his characters off with happy ends!). It also reminded me of Martin Amis's novella 'Night Train' and the American Music Club song, 'Kathleen'...The book stands next to any film or book in the recent neo-noir tradition (from Jim Thompson spouted 'Blood Simple'/'Fargo'; 'A Simple Plan'; 'Chinatown'; '8mm'; Elmore Leonard's 'Glitz'; Ellroy's 'Clandestine' or 'The Black Dahlia'; the excellent trilogy 'Kill Me Again', 'Red Rock West' & 'The Last Seduction' etc.)...As ever, the language & descriptions are poetic and the possibility of redemption in love positively touching...There are twists and a terrible scene at night, which reads like Kafka's'The Trial' on the worst drugs...The voyeurism & betrayal are horrifying, as the conclusion and sub-plot twists are surreal...It is a refreshing take on the Private Eye- the lead character's whole existence is based on deception...So, an existential noir- that is highly readable and along with 'Jesus' Son' a good place to begin with Johnson. Best read before moving on to his second, superior noir- the 'Californian Gothic' of 'Already Dead'- with it's masks & drugs & Nietzschean philosophy in the final lost valley...If only ALL of Johnson's books were available in this country- for anyone who likes any American fiction from Carver to Ellroy, from Paluhinuk to West...This is as good as darkness gets...