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Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
Leonard English, a sad and intense young man recovering from a suicide attempt, moves to the Cape Cod resort of Provincetown to work as a disk jockey cum private detective. On his first day there, he encounters a beautiful young woman and falls desperately in love with her — only to find out she prefers those of her own sex to men. English's first assignment, a search for an elusive artist, proves equally frustrating. As winter lengthens and Leonard's anguish mounts, his desperate quests — for the artist, for love, for redemption — take on an increasingly apocalyptic coloring.
257 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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1476 people want to read
About the author
Denis Johnson
60 books2,476 followersPoet, playwright and author Denis Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters' degree from the University of Iowa and received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer's Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently, the National Book Award for Fiction (2007).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 131 reviews
July 14, 2022
What a strange novel this was. But that's precisely why I loved it. This is the novel, after being blown away by Jesus' Son and a collection of poetry, that cemented Denis Johnson in my top three American writers. It's not one of his most well known novels, and to be honest I wasn't expecting much, but oh boy was I ever wrong. It really did leave a massive impression on me.
It centres on Leonard English, a private detective/Radio DJ just about ready to crack; having previously tried to take his own life through hanging. Although the novel does have some elements of a noir, I wouldn't dump it in the category of crime/detective fiction. It's not like that at all. Johnson only ever flirts with it.
Yes, there is missing person investigation going on here; with snooping around looking for leads and all the rest of it, but Johnson's primary focus is more to do with redemption, Lenny's relationship with God, and the woman he falls in love with - a lesbian called Leanna.
Off the top of my head this is the first novel I've ever come across to be set in Provincetown, Massachusetts - it's like the end of a scorpion tail on the map. But if you're thinking of holidaymakers, sunny weather and ice creams, then think again, as the novel takes place out of season. Apart from those huddled together in bars - including Vietnam vets, cross-dressers and junkies - it's practically a ghost town. I didn't know that Provincetown is something of a gay hot spot, and I picked up on that quite early on. The novel certainly is genre-blending, but also gender-bending too. I just had to google Provincetown to learn more. Generally, when reading a novel, I always do this when it comes to a place I knew very little about before.
Lenny - who I believe came from Kansas before arriving in Provincetown, lives in a haze of tobacco and alcohol and empty sex, and tends to get involved in situations that he clearly doesn't fully understand. Lenny wanders the cape feeling more like an onlooker rather than a participant in life; always thinking about heaven, and the mystery of the Resurrection. After his boss/mentor dies, Lenny becomes obsessed with finding this missing man, despite the fact the case has been handed over to another agency. In the end, through trying to locate him, it's evident that Lenny uses this search as a desperate need to try and find himself. He is an unstable man; sometimes a crying emotional wreck; sometimes feeling like he wants to kill, and his psychosis towards the end of the novel that involves him dressing up in drag, carrying a .44 caliber pistol, and going after the local Bishop, really cranks up the tension and anxiety levels. By the end I was pretty much gobsmacked.
While I didn't feel this was on a level with Jesus' Son, it is easily the best of the three novels I've read by him so far. His main characters were so well thought out, his ideas challenging, his prose great, and his originality plain to see, that left me in no doubt of giving it top marks.
October 21, 2016
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.”
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.”
February 4, 2015
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.
March 26, 2021
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...
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...
September 5, 2016
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
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
February 4, 2015
#4 in the denis johnson read of 2014-15. this one comes from the same place as "stars at noon" and "angels" than the future fantasy of "fiskadoro." i think it's much closer to the ordinary-psycho vibe of "angels" than "stars at noon," which wasn't much of anything. there is definitely a moment toward the end, when protagonist lenny english is basically arguing out loud with the ghost of a dead man on a yankee clipper bus, and refers to the peopel around him on the bus as sleazy angels, that it becam claer to me that is definitely coming from wherever "angels" came from, right down to the way it builds up toward an act of madness.
speaking of madness: no one writes insanity better than denis johnson, or at least if there is a person who writes it better, i'm not sure i can handle reading that writing. something about the way the leonard's thoughts bend and bend and bend -- it's not that you can go there with him, but what he thinks makes sense at least -- until you look up and you're looking at a piece of art that howls with insanity, like a fork with each tine knotted in a perfect bow.
i have spent a sum of 24 hours of my life in provincetown massachusetts/greater cape cod. i'm glad to have those data points because they help me understand the setting of most of this book more. something about the air being both sunless and bright, just kind of glowing, helped me see this whole book very well.
plot summary doesn't really do this justice but: a man recovering from an attempted suicide (by hanging) from kansas shows up in cape cod to take a job as a combo private eye and radio station helper-outer (the absurdity of this is never addressed and never really needs to be). he gets involved private-eyeing on these lesbians. he falls in love with one of the lesbians. his boss, who runs both the private eye agency and the radio station) dies. the guy then winds up taking on a last case (he is not even a real detective of any sort; detection here seems to be a very unadorned metaphor for the act of writing or just living) where he tries to find a missing painter. the missing painter is also obsessed with suicide by hanging, and specifically with whether hangees can be resuscitated via electric shock. there's this weird and not sufficientaly realized side plot about a miliitia-like group called the Truth Infantry which may or may not just be some dudes who shoot at tin cans on weekends. from there the book takes an even harder left turn into the protagonist dressing up like a woman and attempting an act of sea piracy (not makign this up).
there is a lot of deranged, severely motivated driving of cars around cape cod and sitting in bars and seeing the mutant pageanty of humanity in 360 degrees. the book is larded with those elevated, unreal, unimpeachable DJ descriptions, ways of seeing. it's too long, and could probably have been condensed by maybe 50 pages, and even the result would be not perfect, but i don't care. this is a flawed novel which very very frequently breaks out into artistic perfection. a lot of like tree of smoke but mercifully shorter.
PS also bonus 1990s pop culture nuggest, pretty sure the band "superdrag," authors of "who sucked out the feeling," took their band name from a tossed off line in the last 20 pages of this book.
PPS my brain feels polluted, not in a bad way, after reading this. it's not clean, it is full of denis johnson.
“Are you aware you’re raving out loud so everybody can hear?”
“It’s okay. I’m cultivating it.”
“You’re cultivating it?”
“I’m letting it happen. I’m in control. It’s cool.”
speaking of madness: no one writes insanity better than denis johnson, or at least if there is a person who writes it better, i'm not sure i can handle reading that writing. something about the way the leonard's thoughts bend and bend and bend -- it's not that you can go there with him, but what he thinks makes sense at least -- until you look up and you're looking at a piece of art that howls with insanity, like a fork with each tine knotted in a perfect bow.
i have spent a sum of 24 hours of my life in provincetown massachusetts/greater cape cod. i'm glad to have those data points because they help me understand the setting of most of this book more. something about the air being both sunless and bright, just kind of glowing, helped me see this whole book very well.
plot summary doesn't really do this justice but: a man recovering from an attempted suicide (by hanging) from kansas shows up in cape cod to take a job as a combo private eye and radio station helper-outer (the absurdity of this is never addressed and never really needs to be). he gets involved private-eyeing on these lesbians. he falls in love with one of the lesbians. his boss, who runs both the private eye agency and the radio station) dies. the guy then winds up taking on a last case (he is not even a real detective of any sort; detection here seems to be a very unadorned metaphor for the act of writing or just living) where he tries to find a missing painter. the missing painter is also obsessed with suicide by hanging, and specifically with whether hangees can be resuscitated via electric shock. there's this weird and not sufficientaly realized side plot about a miliitia-like group called the Truth Infantry which may or may not just be some dudes who shoot at tin cans on weekends. from there the book takes an even harder left turn into the protagonist dressing up like a woman and attempting an act of sea piracy (not makign this up).
there is a lot of deranged, severely motivated driving of cars around cape cod and sitting in bars and seeing the mutant pageanty of humanity in 360 degrees. the book is larded with those elevated, unreal, unimpeachable DJ descriptions, ways of seeing. it's too long, and could probably have been condensed by maybe 50 pages, and even the result would be not perfect, but i don't care. this is a flawed novel which very very frequently breaks out into artistic perfection. a lot of like tree of smoke but mercifully shorter.
PS also bonus 1990s pop culture nuggest, pretty sure the band "superdrag," authors of "who sucked out the feeling," took their band name from a tossed off line in the last 20 pages of this book.
PPS my brain feels polluted, not in a bad way, after reading this. it's not clean, it is full of denis johnson.
“Are you aware you’re raving out loud so everybody can hear?”
“It’s okay. I’m cultivating it.”
“You’re cultivating it?”
“I’m letting it happen. I’m in control. It’s cool.”
January 20, 2013
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.
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.
February 15, 2022
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.
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.
November 10, 2016
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 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.
October 12, 2019
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.
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.
June 7, 2021
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.
July 3, 2024
A new favourite prose writer erring just too far to the side of gratuity. Timely read.
June 1, 2019
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).
September 20, 2012
Leave it to Johnson to give us a book as insane as the main character of this one. It sucked me in, but I definitely felt Lenny's confusion. He's nuts...there's just no other way to say it. The book is wild, and good. Johnson has lived up to his reputation yet again.
September 16, 2020
"How quickly would a person's life progress along its lines if he followed every impulse as if started from God? How much more quickly would he be healed? Or how much faster destroyed?"
Second read.
Second read.
November 24, 2025
*2.5 stars. Johnson is an incredible writer. There are things here that were bizarre and interesting and there also was great writing - but otherwise it’s too spec, too gonzo and too unstructured and dreamlike to keep me engaged and to really nail home whatever the deep meanings Johnson had in mind about God, and death and life and self and identity. Shame.
December 16, 2024
This would make a good Wes Anderson movie I think. Loved the dialogue and characters . Slightly confused about leanna
Read
July 14, 2025Read next to various bodies of water under various influences. Made sense then. Couldn’t tell you now, though.
September 9, 2021
Very interesting journey taken with the main character, Leonard English, as he hopes to recover from a suicide attempt by relocating from Kansas to a small progressive New England town, only to be further submersed into a spiraling mental breakdown. I found it important to pay attention to the writing since the plot seemed to meander a bit, and that helped me enjoy this work.
May 8, 2012
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.
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.
April 9, 2014
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*
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*
June 23, 2008
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.
"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.
December 4, 2016
What a disturbing book. I kept thinking the protagonist was dead (probably just his soul was dead). If he succeeded with his suicide attempt before he moved to Provincetown, that would explain plenty about his personality and potency.....he was very zombie-like. The ending was perfect for a soul-dead guy -- prison as heaven. My favorite part was the big drag show at the beginning....and P-town was a great character.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 21, 2013
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.
January 29, 2017
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.
August 1, 2020
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.
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.
March 10, 2025
A strange genre-bendy novel about a man who moves to a small town, leaving behind a life that culminated in a suicide attempt. The story follows this man as he grapples with his faith, with God, with his delusions, and his sanity.
I love Denis Johnson, I count him among my favourite writers, but sadly this is my least favourite of the six books of his I’ve read. It does stand apart from the other five, though: it’s looser, and a lot more open-ended. I would love to know how Johnson felt about it, looking back on it years later – if he was critical of what I perceive to be a slackness, or authorial indecision. He once said that he regretted his attempts to talk about his religious beliefs: “I’m not qualified. I don’t know who God is, or any of that. People concerned with those questions turn up in my stories, but I can’t explain why they do. Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t.”
In saying that though, I also actually enjoyed it for its very 90s American novel vibe. It made me nostalgic. I used to read a lot more late twentieth century novels by American men. Novels like this don’t get written anymore. And Johnson’s writing is always fantastic. He’s a natural poet, and as one review stated, “there is real music in his prose.”
It had been years since my last Johnson book, so it was nice to be in silent communion with him again. With a writer whose fictions you connect to naturally and deeply, often just their voice alone is enough.
I love Denis Johnson, I count him among my favourite writers, but sadly this is my least favourite of the six books of his I’ve read. It does stand apart from the other five, though: it’s looser, and a lot more open-ended. I would love to know how Johnson felt about it, looking back on it years later – if he was critical of what I perceive to be a slackness, or authorial indecision. He once said that he regretted his attempts to talk about his religious beliefs: “I’m not qualified. I don’t know who God is, or any of that. People concerned with those questions turn up in my stories, but I can’t explain why they do. Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t.”
In saying that though, I also actually enjoyed it for its very 90s American novel vibe. It made me nostalgic. I used to read a lot more late twentieth century novels by American men. Novels like this don’t get written anymore. And Johnson’s writing is always fantastic. He’s a natural poet, and as one review stated, “there is real music in his prose.”
It had been years since my last Johnson book, so it was nice to be in silent communion with him again. With a writer whose fictions you connect to naturally and deeply, often just their voice alone is enough.
July 2, 2025
It does get away from him from time to time, especially in the middle, but there is tons to admire in this book, tons to consider, tons to steal. Denis Johnson had so few peers when it came to the quality of his sentence-level writing. It just sings, his prose. An example:
“On the darkening street, where lamps were starting to take over the business of making things visible but where a little daylight clung to the air, English watched two boys going home late from school. It was almost Valentine's Day, but Halloween was what they were talking about, and one of them suddenly tossed down his books and raised his arms to demonstrate, for the other, how big a pumpkin had been. This pantomime had a curious effect on English — he 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.”
“On the darkening street, where lamps were starting to take over the business of making things visible but where a little daylight clung to the air, English watched two boys going home late from school. It was almost Valentine's Day, but Halloween was what they were talking about, and one of them suddenly tossed down his books and raised his arms to demonstrate, for the other, how big a pumpkin had been. This pantomime had a curious effect on English — he 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.”
April 8, 2024
No one ever went to the late-great Denis Johnson for coherence. If you’re looking for plot, you’ve made a wrong turn—like Lenny English, the barely-clinging-to-sanity protagonist (“hero” is a stretch) of this 1991 rambler. After a suicide attempt (“You tried to kill yourself?” “I didn’t succeed.”) English crashes his car in Cape Cod & stumbles into a gig as a part-time private eye & late-night DJ. (About as Johnson-y as it gets.) He’s tracking down missing persons, but he thinks God’s looking for him. A metaphysical mystery that doesn’t hold up. (Gay characters weren’t Johnson’s strength.) Expect no answers.
May 28, 2019
In the end, I could only get through half of this book. I kept picking it up, putting it down. Like a Planet Fitness commercial! The few sentences Johnson had here that were poetic and beautiful, were just that, few and far between.
I was hoping things would start to come together and make sense. I was hoping I would start to like Lenny. I wanted to keep going to try and understand what in the world Leanna saw in Lenny that made her want to be with him - on any level. Their conversations and interactions left much to be desired. Nothing was making sense elsewhere with all of the other characters either.
Perhaps a plot was just around the corner, perhaps I should have kept going and read a few more words, a few more pages until things fell into place.... but at more than halfway through, I lost all interest. I could very well be missing something here too. I probably just popped my Denis Johnson cherry with the wrong book.
I was hoping things would start to come together and make sense. I was hoping I would start to like Lenny. I wanted to keep going to try and understand what in the world Leanna saw in Lenny that made her want to be with him - on any level. Their conversations and interactions left much to be desired. Nothing was making sense elsewhere with all of the other characters either.
Perhaps a plot was just around the corner, perhaps I should have kept going and read a few more words, a few more pages until things fell into place.... but at more than halfway through, I lost all interest. I could very well be missing something here too. I probably just popped my Denis Johnson cherry with the wrong book.
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