girl what…

from about a hundred pages in reading this filled me with such anxious dread

This book was written as if a white male in his early 30's diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia in the midst of florid psychosis attempted to document his life by dictating it to a white male in his early 20's who is just trying his hand at writing but really thinks he's hot shit.

I learned from this book that Denis Johnson can indeed write a novel every bit as good as his short story collection, Jesus' Son. It's about a guy living in Provincetown, MA during the offseason, working part-time as a radio dj, part-time for a private investigator. Sounds like it would be over the top, but people who have read Jesus' Son know DJ is more of a master of hallucinatory, poetic prose.

dude does not have the best time in Massachuessetts

This is an amazing book. Excerpt:

"And I asked myself: The way you are now, would your eight-year-old self approve of you? Would your eight-year-old self -- that totally innocent child, with those ideals that are real, man, and human -- would he approve?"

The tall thin man got up and headed out the door.

"No fucking way. I was betraying that kid," Phil said, "my childhood self. I'm talking about the real feeling of like if you stuck a bayonet in your buddy's back, not just ripping off a friend or something like that, but killing, death. You know what I'm saying man?" Phil's face was crushed under the pressure of his pain. "I don't think you know the kind of treachery I'm talking about."

"Whatever's on tap," English said, and the bartender drew him a glass of beer.

Phil's troubled scrutiny had floated over and snagged on the cross-dresser. "You never tasted that kind of treachery, man."

The cross-dresser smiled and shrugged. Her eyes were very red.

"But then, and then it was like," Phil said, holding his hand out before him, gazing cross-eyed into his open palm as if this memory rested right there in it, "the ghost of John Lennon appeared to me. And he said, Fuck that, he can't judge you, because an eight-year-old doesn't have the knowledge, man. Those ideals of yesterday, even everything you believed two hours ago, man -- fuck that. We don't need to apologize to our past selves. They were the ones who turned into us. We are just who we are. You know?" he asked the cross-dresser.

She sat in splendid isolation, putting her very red lips around the cherry from her Manhattan.

The novel’s protagonist, 25 year old Leonard English, has arrived to Provincetown after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Within a short space of time he succeeds in turning his life around; he gets employment as a night owl DJ and with surveillance for a Private Investigator, both for the same boss, and falls in love with a lesbian who he entices out for a date.
English becomes fascinated by his seemingly absurd surveillance activities, and becomes involved in situations he doesn’t fully understand.

Though the novel is to do with mystery and detecting, it is not a crime novel. Rather, it is a shrewd observation of the recovery of a broken man and his efforts to try and find himself. As you might expect with Johnson, it’s done at a brisk pace, with snappy prose and his trademark dark humour.

This review should be read beside my reviews of Pat Conroy's "The Prince of Tides" and Diane Les Becquets "Breaking Wild".
I first read "Resuscitation of a Hanged Man" shortly after it came out (25+ years ago?) and told friends that it was either an brilliant or crap and I couldn't tell which. Like "Prince of Tides", it stayed on my shelf until about six months ago when I picked it up again. What struck me immediately was how much didn't stick with me from my first read. In many ways it was like reading a book that I'd read a review of (and I'm beginning to appreciate the distance between a review and a read).
This time I found it a borderline okay read, definitely not a keeper, and said to the same friends that twenty-five years later I tended towards crap (it's not crap, it just tends towards that side of the crap-brilliant gauge).
Again, my opinion only.

Brilliant stuff.

?

Fabulous.

I'm real close to giving this book 5 stars - the story itself is crazy and wonderful and engaging (a book to really gobble), the writing is absolutely masterful, the characters bizzare and unique - I guess I just didn't particularly dig the end. Don't know what I expected or how it couldn't been different, but there ya go, that's my honest feeling. In any case, maybe it wasn't totally amazing, but I did *love* the experience reading it. I've become a total fan of Denis Johnson.

Johnson's grinding journey into the sepulcher of modern American spiritualism is a harsh path to follow, but the authors mastery of disintegration is enthralling.

Constantly flirting with poetry, his prose retains the hard edges needed to make it vivid and by turns exhausting and awakening.

The central character bears heavy themes in an unhinged, pansexual and progressively, surreally spiritual geography of the fringe.

Really, a poetry of salvaged lives in an increasingly complex world.
Where is the spirit among the ascending and descending hordes?
In the crash.
In the dust.
In the resurrection.

Johnson has carved his own mark on American Literature, so much so that his fiction is more fully appreciated after a wide exposure to his work.
I therefore recommend reading his first novel Angels before Resuscitation of a Hanged Man