Another example that Denis Johnson is the greatest living American writer around. He's able to weave a sentence and story that's both poetic and incredibly evil and twisted with such ease... you'll put your pen down in defeat if you're an aspiring writer. Read this (but stay away from Already Dead - that one was a misstep).

Starting tonight. In between Harry Potters...

I almost read the whole thing in one sitting but I needed to go to bed. I'll finish tonight. Once more we're invited into the world of one seriously messed up dude. As in Jesus' Son, Already Dead, The Stars at Noon and Angels one of the issues is substance abuse, a topic DJ is intimately familiar with. In this book we also got some religious juice poured on top. That's something that came to the author in recovery. NOT interested... As in Tree of Smoke we are(if we care for non-human animals) gut-punched with human nastiness toward animals and the blatant ignoring of suffering deliberately caused buy us. You might weep along with those vivisected doggies, kitty cats and other victims. Don DeLillo's seemingly callous attitude about this(I could be wrong) was one of the causes of my putting down Underworld. Anyway...

- The tone of this story is a bit flatter than in other works by DJ. It's all still pretty crazy and he's a GREAT writer but the psychic background is as subdued as the off-season Cape Cod environment. Been there, done that too - on Martha's Vineyard.

- I wonder if the Leanne thing is based on his wife.

- I think some of the tone is supposed to be absurdist "comedy".

- WHY is Leanne interested in Lenny???? He's a major mess!

- A direct story connection to Fiskadoro pops up!

- As always, DJ can't resist the murky prose-poetry as well as the out-and-out breakout in actual poetry. Not a LOT of it, thankfully.

- The second disco scene is a dazzler - great writing!

- The love-sex stuff seems trite to me. An old cynic I guess...

- The half-dead fetus - another brutal scene.

- Maybe a bit too much like Already Dead(2*) but also a lot like The Stars at Noon(4*).

Now done after last night. I was planning to give this a 4* rating but I'm keeping it at 3* after the author went down that slippery slope into a muddle of prose-poetry and straight out poetry near the end. It devolved into an "Already Dead"-type of incoherent mess. I suppose that must have seemed justified considering that Lenny himself was an incoherent mess. The last few pages of dialogue was fine, however. Nobody does the crazy talk of criminal losers better than Mr. J. I guess I have to resign myself that I can't visit the spiritual/ emotional/creative/whatever levels that the author aspires to communicate. Still, I love Denis Johnson's prose a LOT of the time.

- Lenny goes bat-shit crazy. Why???

- The ending reminds of Taxi Driver and other more recent and all-too-real events in Colorado, Texas, Arizona and Connecticut.

- final rating is 3.5 which rounds down to 3*

Overall, I was a little disappointed in this book. One of my favorite books is Johnson’s collection of short stories, “Jesus’ Son”, and I probably had some unrealistic expectations about this novel when I started reading it. Like many of the stories in “Jesus’ Son”, the novel focuses on a man living on the margins of society. Having survived a suicide attempt, the main character, Lenny English, accepts a vague job offer and travels to a small resort town in Cape Cod in order to get his life back on track. Once there, the novel traces his spiraling descent into obsession and madness.

The pace of the novel is leisurely and the plot is paper-thin. While many of the stories in “Jesus’ Son” also lacked what could be called a plot, that isn’t as much of a disadvantage in a 6 page short story as it is in a full length novel. The lack of plot probably wouldn’t have been that much of a detriment if the main character had been more compelling, but I didn’t find Lenny really that interesting and his actions in the final section of the book come across as more of a writer’s artifice than something genuine that sprang naturally out of the character.

Still, Johnson is an excellent writer and the book is filled with well-crafted passages and sentences that burn brightly. Throughout the novel, the quest for love and faith plays out as a central theme. Lenny comes to feel a “sense of a cloud between me and God, the intuition that now, behind the cloud, is the time of faith”. However, his attempts to connect with others and with his God are fruitless:

“He went into the large white church, Our Lady of the Snows, overlooking the yellow field. It was unreasonably dark inside, and he just sat for a few minutes amid the tale whiff of censers and the little musk of the ranks of votive candles, his arms wrapped around himself, until he had to admit that it was just no use – he was only sitting here hugging himself in still another of his faith’s innumerable churches named for saints and ladies. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness he began to feel dominated by the blank stares of the plaster martyrs. Our Lady was no longer a nurturing mother but an enchantress – a shimmering goddess – no more a present comfort but a tantalizing absence. What ark would he sail, what chariot, with what wings, how could he reach her?”

Overall, something of a letdown, but still with enough flashes of brilliance here and there to make it worth reading

This would make a good Wes Anderson movie I think. Loved the dialogue and characters . Slightly confused about leanna

Visionary meandering. Full of startling sentences and lyrical interludes. A close cousin to Joy William's novels, "Resuscitation of a Hanged Man" is steeped in simmering spiritual crisis and resort town malaise. The plot itself offers a quiet stroll into insanity, taking potshots at well-made conspiracy stories with a pistol full of blanks.

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)

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.

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbgPS...

Reminded me of Robert Stone's Hall of Mirrors and found it equally annoying as I did not pick up the vibe of this insane, unreliable narrator. I did not care enough about the character to get invested with whether he was delusional and the plot was delusional. Both books had colorful settings, New Orleans and Provincetown, but that wasn't enough for me.

Love DJ. Just not this one. Still. Worth the read.

I don't think anyone considers this Johnson's best work, or even a successful novel, insofar as one can define such a thing. But I appreciate how he wrestles with some of the same questions that emerge in his other works, namely the existence of God, and what that existence might mean for man, and the conviction that, if God is real, if you really do believe that, then you must be prepared for upheaval. There's far more integrity in being an agnostic asking in terror what God demands, than a putative Christian relaxing in the comforting delusion that an almighty creator who died in infamy for the redemption of man is cool with us just singing some praise songs once a week during our 50-minute church services.

And even though this novel stumbles along, and the protagonist is irritatingly passive and marginally sane but not in a way that really advances a coherent plot, there are passages like this:

"I'm your God, come here. But you're standing in a storm, God. Yes, and I'm calling you to come here. But how do I know you're God? Because I'm all that's in front of you, and all that was behind you is gone: choose the storm or you get nothing."

Which in a way is how I feel about this book, and possibly every sentence Johnson penned in his lifetime of striving: I'll take the storm, even when it causes the ship to founder.

Very, very good, almost a Pynchony ripoff with some heavy religious undertones. The looming disastrous ending is rather lackluster. I'm interested to read his other stuff, though, has some potential and this novel was very early.

A pleasant enough tale of life in a small town by the Cape Cod beach, invaded by hordes of celebrating transvestites and butch girls every summer, and wistfully observed through the eyes of a man who didn't die when he hanged himself back in Kansas. He tries to get involved with one of the girls, but she's not monogamous, and he is. He's also doing detective work for his boss, the owner of a radio station, and it leads him to find out about some mysterious militia group and a missing amateur artist. It's really about him pursuing his obsessions and sanity. I guess it's more fun if you were raised Catholic - lots of ineffectual contact with priests.