Two or one stars.

All American writing seems bad after a certain point.

Geoff Rickly approved.

Maybe this is a five star novel. Maybe.

Although this has the most holes, of the four Johnson books I’ve read, I’d say this is second to Jesus’ Son. Angels and Train Dreams are tight and succinct, while Resuscitation is roomy and fun.

This is a thriller. But not your typical thriller. An important distinction I noticed is that this is a character driven thriller. Not plot driven. There is a plot. There is definitely a plot. But the characters are more important. They determine the outcome, rather than the outcome determining them. By this I mean that Johnson probably didn’t start this book with the end in mind.

I think I’ve heard Johnson used to call himself a Christian writer. If so, then this book must have been written at a time he was battling with his faith.
This is about a knight of faith. A modern Joan Of Arc or Simone Weil.

For whom should we live or die?

Johnson does an interesting thing here.
He superimposes religious identity and sexual identity. Many characters who are gender fluid and uncertain of their sexuality are sure of their faith, while characters certain of their sexuality struggle with their faith.

Johnson carves an edge into certainty and indecision that makes this thriller all the more zany.

I can’t say this novel shows it’s age, because I know there are still many people whose faith has driven them out due to their sexuality. But, today, if a reader picks up this book, they must read it to conclusion. Otherwise they may leave it in offense.

The language is often beautiful. The dialogue is loads of fun. Can whoever taught Johnson how to navigate a scene please adopt me?

Influences? Ripe with them: Whitman, Eliot’s Wasteland, Crime and Punishment. Maybe The Tenant. Maybe Alan Parker’s movie Angel Heart. There are others.

I don’t think Denis Johnson found the answers he was looking for when he set out to write this. I think he was more confused than ever.

It has it's moments but at other times feels like an attempt to sell a screenplay.

A haunting book that follows one man's journey grappling with his own sense of disorientation and angst. Leonard English is clearly a deeply disturbed man who fools himself and those around him into thinking that he is OK. He wanders throughout the book, meeting motley cast of characters who range from delusional to upright sadistic. And in his wanderings, he is searching deeply for his own life's meaning. His search ramps up in the last third of the book and ends, not triumphantly, but, like many of Denis Johnson's works, with a bang and a thud.

About facing despair. The language is beautiful. My car broke down and I was waiting for my girlfriend to pick me up, and I read the line, "He was happy to see the empowering things of man slide sideways into their natural uselessness," and I'll never forget it.

Interesting to read a "minor" and essentially random work like this, which is not something I do often. I recognized the name Denis Johnson, but don't know much about him or where he sits in the canon (other than that Tree of Smoke was on prominent display at Indigo, the big book retailer, last time I went there). Other reviewers mention that there are sentences that don't quite work; for me, it's not so much that there are sentences that don't quite work, but rather that the book is halfway between mass market and something more literary. For me, the themes and the plot don't quite work. Things don't come together at the end (I barely understood what the conclusion of the mystery was supposed to be), and neither are they belayed into an ambiguity that feels meaningful or intentional.

Although I still feel like I learned a few things about writing, I'm glad I didn't take any longer with it. Sometimes one can learn the most about art from works that don't quite stick the landing. For one, it was valuable to lower the stakes.

This is the the first novel I've read by Denis Johnson (The Name of the World and Nobody Move were novellas), but the quality of Resuscitation remains consistent (though there, I'd be sort of working in retrospect, as the latter was published long before the others—I digress).

It's clear to me after reading this and Johnson's other work that he is a master of the humorous realism of everyday, original conversation. Often his characters become distracted from the subject of conversation—in this case, because of something strange said or done by midwestern protagonist Leonard English, often out of place in flamboyant Provincetown, Mass. The characters have incredibly genuine, unique conversations, the quality of which are unparalleled to my knowledge.

Beyond my penchant toward Johnson's very real characters, Resuscitation is an emotional, eye-opening, sometimes heart-wrenching tale of a man (English) on a quest of spiritual discovery following a suicide attempt. Johnson does a great job of not making this all a long-winded existential tale by placing it in the background of English's sometimes hapless detective investigation.

Above all else (as I believe characters fuel novels), Johnson creates a character you'll find yourself constantly pulling for. Along with a handful of other characters, Leonard English is one I doubt I'll ever forget.

I'll admit that I'm jealous of Denis Johnson. Jesus' Son is one of my favorite collections of short stories because its prose has a kind of powderkeg efficiency that I admire, and because nobody does shellshock quite like Johnson.

That said, this book drove me up the wall. While many moments in it were sharply precise, even lyrical, the novel suffers from too much distance from its main character, and hamhandedly gestures towards a satire of spiritual determinism that comes off as a little half-baked. And while I won't begrudge Johnson his ability to write surreal, but heart-punchingly true dialogue, frequently he missteps in Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. Rather than writing scenes in which conversation between lovers gleefully derails, Johnson too frequently here seems to be making a point *about* how conversational between lovers frequently derails. What that point is, exactly, remains somewhat muddled.

This wry device, along with Johnson's tonal ability to choose between preciousness (I'm thinking of many of the radio station scenes) and grave spirituality, keeps the story and the characters frustratingly at bay. By the time the final scenes showed up, even though the protagonist's character arc takes an interesting direction into moonbat crazy Joan of Arc territory, I was ready to put the book down.

Beautiful, visionary, quite nearly perfect. You’ll sense in this novel the early stages of taut, sensitive, deadpan, shockingly down-and-out prose that later exploded into the eleven polished stories that comprise Johnson’s masterpiece, Jesus’ Son. Read it.

I can not even imagine how it's possible that an author can create such a cacophony of emotional notes and yet I remain stone deaf to the music. I feel inadequate from the attempt.

“It’s amazing how a song can take a whole confused epoch in your life, and fashion it into something sharp and elegant with which to pierce your neck.”