Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

I really wanted to read Denis Johnson’s newest--Tree of Smoke, but I didn’t want to spring $27.00 for the hardback, and my library didn’t have it available right away, so I grabbed Resuscitation of a Hanged Man in the interim. I’d never read anything else by this prolific writer, and a reviewer of Tree said that Johnson was his favorite living author. Jumping into Resuscitation was a good move on my part.

In the world of this early (published 1995, set in 1980-81), everything is off kilter, which is to be expected, since we’re looking at it all through the eyes of Lenny English. English has moved to Cape Cod--Provincetown--after an unsuccessful suicide attempt and is trying to reshape his life. He succeeds, but not in a way that most people would define success. He lays out his problem clearly near the beginning of the book:



“I’ve changed addresses eighteen times in the last twelve years, he told Leanna. “I’ve lived in Lawrence, Kansas, that whole time. I’m a nice person, but I have a lot of inside trouble.”

“Inside trouble. What is that” Inside trouble.”
“Unsound thinking. Getting myself all worked up over nothing. You know what I mean.” If you told people these things right away, they discounted it all. Later you could say, I warned you. “I smoke cigarettes,” He told her.

“That’s okay,” she said.

“I eat meat.”

“And you’re aggressive in conversations.”

“That’s true. Yeah. Okay, sometimes I am.”

“That way you don’t have to respond to anyone.”

This happened to be the truth. he looked around. “They have any coffee in this place?”

“When you’re on a bus, nobody sits near you because you look too lonely. I bet you’re lonely, but not because nobody wants to know you. It’s because, really, you don’t want to know anybody.”


He gets a job as a part time private eye/part time DJ. In the course of his investigations, he discovers some mysteries, invents others, solves another, tries hard to give his life a shape, but his “unsound thinking” pursues him. It’s one of the best fictional explorations I’ve read concerning the battle between self-knowledge and the attempts at self-repair based on that knowledge.

Both on the basis of the text and of the short bio I read (Click on Johnson’s name at the top of this piece.), Johnson has had plenty of experience with this kind of problem. English is not some sort of offbeat character invented for effect (for examples of which see Little Children, by Tom Perrotta, in my last blog) but a complex personality created from the inside out and explored with sympathy, humor, and unmerciful authenticity.

I’m really looking forward to Tree of Smoke, but it can’t be much better than this. And I’ve found a new author.

A new favourite prose writer erring just too far to the side of gratuity. Timely read.

3.5/5

It's almost a cliche to mention this, but it's so prominent in his work that it's also unavoidable, so here we go - Denis Johnson trafficks in a certain mysticism. The six books I've read by him all offer variations on the same story: a broken person goes out in search of transcendence but in the process only damages themselves more, either because the very thing they think will save them ends up destroying them (the war in Tree of Smoke, the heroin in the unforgettable Jesus' Son), or because, as in the case of this book, they're so caught up in their quest and their expectations that they miss out on basic human connection. I'm compelled by that; it's why I go back to Johnson even though a few of his more popular works have disappointed me. Still, this is an example of a book that doesn't quite find a way around its flaws, though it's interesting as hell.

The basic notion is this. English, isolated after a failed suicide attempt, finds his way to a tourist town in Massachusetts. Here he falls in love with a woman named Leanna, who doesn't quite return his feelings, in part because she's a lesbian and in part because English is a fucking weirdo-bird who makes everyone around him deeply uncomfortable. At the same time, he finds work as a private investigator. He's tasked with tracking down a painter who has mysteriously vanished, and who, it turns out, has connections with a militia group up in New Hampshire. English takes the investigation quite seriously, maybe too seriously, and gets so sucked in that it damages his already-shaky relationship with Leanne, as well as, increasingly, his grip on reality.

Now, there's a lot to unpack here, so let's go. I found the mystery aspect of this novel extremely compelling. English is a variation on the classic noir type, the schmuck who's already in deep and has a unique talent of digging himself deeper. I found it refreshing how this was out of a basic incompetence on his part. He's not a Sam Spade tough guy, always asking the right questions. No, he's a goddamn weirdo who makes everyone uncomfortable. I feel like there's some connection between English and all the disturbing folks who spend too much time on the internet and fall into these weird holes, though this book was written well before any of that, so I could be drawing imaginary connections there. Now, I don't want to get too into spoilers, but the way the way Johnson handles the mystery dovetails quite nicely with English's character. It is, in short, a Ride.

The gender and sexuality stuff comes at us heavy. The town is populated mostly by gay people, and English... well, it's not as though he's unsympathetic, but he doesn't quite get it, at least not at first. I don't think Johnson handled this aspect all that well. The numerous gay characters don't really transcend the cardboard cutout phase, and English's interest in them never gets much beyond voyeurism, which could've been powerful thematically if the gay characters had been a little more developed. Even Leanna, a constant presence in the novel, doesn't seem to be much more than an object of fascination. I can't speak to Johnson's own perspectives on gay people, and in the end, we'd have to ask him. Suffice it to say that the problem exists on two levels, representation and craft. We've already discussed the representation, so let me say that from a craft point-of-view, this aspect of the novel feels undercooked, maybe because Johnson himself couldn't stop staring, maybe because the issues of identity this plotline points at don't quite come across. Leanna is a fairly one-dimensional character, and English, interesting as he is, never quite comes out of the shadows.

So I don't know. As compelling as I find Johnson's broader project, I have to take him book by book. He seems at his best when he's most purposeful and focused, which might be why I've enjoyed his two short story collections most out of his work (I mean, seriously, the death-haunted The Largesse of the Sea Maiden means business). This one seemed like he took one very focused thread and grafted it onto a half-baked one, and the resulting novel is about... oh, 75% ready. But that means a quarter of it needed to go back to the shop, and that's just not going to get you into four-star territory. Not when I'm around.

This novel is like a puzzle. A puzzle with a couple dog chewed or wine stained pieces preventing the whole from being a superb work of art. Though it very much is just that: art. Johnson writes gorgeous sentences. But there are also some lunkers separating the beauty from the clunky.
I think what stood out most to me was Johnson's ability to draw desperation. Lovelorn and perpetually lonely, his characters are on the very edge of sanity, requiring human connection. English, the protagonist, a peripatetic itinerant, is so profoundly isolated from his fellow man he becomes more and more estranged from the reader as well. His motivations begin to make little sense even as the reader has a window to his soul. He seeks the counsel of god the same way a raving street preacher acts as a vessel. There's a little bit of English in all of us, I think. Those days when we're consumed by love that we mistake it's chemical high for a newfound clarity.
I really admire this novel. Even as it frustrated and delighted in equal measure, it will linger.

I love this novel.

33 pages in, we learn of English's former job at Minotaur Systems.

As a child, he'd been bothered by certain noises in his bedroom closet. Now the closet was opened, and everything he'd imagined inside it came out and revealed itself to be his employer.

Amazing.

Johnson's descriptive power comes out in this passage about a church mural in Provincetown.

It was large, more vaulting, than the church he'd gone to in Lawrence. At the front, behind the altar, the middle of the huge wall telescoped outward away from the congregation, making for the altar not just a great chamber that had nothing to do with the rest of the place but almost another world, because its three walls were given over completely to a gigantic mural depicting the wild ocean in a storm. In the middle of this storm, a bigger-than-life-size Jesus stood on a black, sea-dashed rock in his milky garment. The amount of blue in this intimidating scene, sky blues and aquas and frothy blues and cobalts and indigos and azures, taking up about half the congregation's sight, lent to their prayers a soft benedictive illumination like a public aquarium's.

Turns out that was a real mural in a real church, sadly destroyed by fire in 2005.

https://www.stpeters-ptown.org/Church...

https://buildingprovincetown.wordpres...

I used to think Johnson’s fiction was about down-and-outs searching for salvation, but now I realize that it’s actually about down-and-outs being found by their saviour. The ending sort of devolves into something too melodramatic for my (and probably most readers’) tastes, but that is an easy thing to pardon when the rest of the book sings, aches and breaks with the weight of eternity on its spine. Johnson was one of a few authors stupid enough to write about what he didn’t (and couldn’t) know.

This is novel number 4 in my project to (re-)read all of Johnson’s novels and poetry. And this is the first of his novels that was new to me, with Angels, Fiskadoro and The Stars at Noon all being re-reads.

When you think about it, the whole setup for this book is completely bonkers. Leonard English heads to Provincetown, Cape Cod to get away from a failed suicide attempt and with a sort of offer of employment as a mixture of DJ and PI. When he gets there he discovers the town is centre for the local gay and transvestite community and he promptly falls in love with a lesbian he meets at the first Catholic mass he attends.

And off we go. Johnson’s novels always look at people on the edge of society and there is no change here. But there’s also a healthy (?) dose of paranoia and conspiracy theory in this novel which sets itself up as, almost, a detective novel but heads off in some strange directions.

That opening summary tells you what the three main themes of the book are going to be. The search for redemption, love, and religion. But all, as Emily Dickinson would want, told slantwise. Religion hovers around over the whole book, often in the form of references to Simone Weil. The progress of English’s obsession with the woman who isn’t interested in men heads the kind of way you might think an obsession would. And English also becomes obsessed with one of his detective cases: this twin obsession is not good for his mental health.

Since I have already read quite a few of Johnson’s works of fiction, I know that what comes next in a chronological reading is his most famous work, “Jesus’ Son”. And you can see that book starting to take shape as you read this one. It is a few years since I last read Jesus’ Son, but there were times in this book when I picked up a very familiar vibe. I do love reading Johnson’s poetic and sometimes anarchic prose.

I mean, you’ve got to love a book that contains the sentence And down on his ass the sad assassin sat.

PS Why is the cover here shown as being a nasty lurid green when it should actually be a rather nice blue/grey.

This novel crept up on me and touched me deeply. It’s an odd mix of existential angst, spiritual crisis and Noir detective story. It’s full of risky sentences that don’t always work, but they’re more often poetry. It’s a bit of a mess at times, but, hey - so am I. Trying to look at it objectively as a whole, I’d rate it 4 stars, but, subjectively, I can’t give it anything less than 5 stars. Why? It’s set in my favorite small American town (Provincetown, Massachusetts) and Denis Johnson absolutely caught its elusive cloud and pinned it down.

We come to Provincetown every year and finally got married here in 2008 - just the two of us, a town clerk, and our dogs as witnesses. Since then, we’ve scattered our dogs' ashes here among the scrub oaks along their favorite nature trail in the outlands overlooking the Atlantic. (That’s the view from their gravesite in the background of my avi.) We’re considering doing the same with our own as well.

25 years ago, we’d come in the summer:

“On Commercial Street all the shops were open, broadcasting tears and fragrances and songs delivering their knives, the aromas of spun candy and suntan oil and incense and perfume. Three women passed him on roller skates, wearing headphones and holding hands. On this avenue he was just another case of the hot-and-lonelies, another attempter working on a firestorm. … Cars nudged through the throng that covered the pavement from wall to wall, cars with their tapedecks blazing stereophonically as they passed, but for the most part it seemed to be a parade consisting of children who had to go to the bathroom now, and parents who wished to go in two different directions - like life - and young, electric, vividly sexual men staring at one another through a drugged haze and couples thinking about leaving one another because the sea’s erotic whisper was making them crazy.”

We don’t come in summer anymore; we come off-season. I’m middle aged now and have “dad bod” and I quickly get tired of crowds and trying to suck in my stomach. Anyhow, it’s always been more about the beauty of nature and the pioneering spirit of the original Pilgrims and the artists and the writers and the quiet solitude of being at the end of the world.

This is what I love the most about this place:

“The sky was open now, he was in the National Seashore, a realm protected from civilization, and the road wasn’t so crowded. He left the pavement a quarter mile or so below the cove and cut across the dunes that rose and fell for quite a distance before they lay down in front of the sea. A few minutes and he’d lost sight of the road, of everything but the sand and the sky; it showed him how all things could fall away in an instant; now he crested a dune and came into a crater empty of everything but sand and the intersecting footprints of other people; the notations delved here by their journeys showed him how each life was one breathtakingly extended musical phrase, and he prayed that their crossings were harmonious.”

“He had no trouble recognizing, in some of these paintings, the eerie Cape light. On overcast days the sun might be just a brighter patch in a grey sky, but its effect would smolder anyway on the hills and occasional white buildings of the countryside and on the water, so that the world seemed to lie straight under a blowtorch; and yet things cast no shadows. English had guessed that the light collected somehow on the waters and made a brightness in the air, even under clouds - just in the air, a brightness not otherwise locatable.”

“He liked the cemetery better. Although generally the light was kind to this place, sometimes giving to the grass and stones the hardy colors of a Surrey countryside, and making the markers blush sometimes in the sunset, it was not unknown for the fog to roll over the whole business swiftly, canceling everything, even the hope of anything, beyond the few nearest blurred gravesite and the brown bones under them.”