[In the following review, Krist offers a generally positive assessment of Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.]

“Hell,” my Lutheran pastor used to teach in confirmation class, “might be something like Heaven—an eternity in God's presence. But in Hell His face is turned away.” In four novels over the past eight years, Denis Johnson has shown himself to be a diligent geographer of just this kind of hell. His characters, strung-out and usually desperate, dwell in a perpetual state of spoiled grace, locked out of a rapture that they can dimly sense but never achieve without losing their sanity. Suffering keenly, scrabbling for redemption, they play out what has become the organizing myth of Johnson's fiction: the descent into the underworld, followed by a resurrection that is bankrupt, compromised, or just plain delusionary. It is the old myth of apotheosis, but subverted—or brought up to date.

In Angels, his first novel, Johnson presented his most immediately recognizable depiction of the God-forsaken underworld. The book's protagonists—Jamie, a runaway young mother, and Bill, a thrice-divorced ex-con—wandered through a darkly poeticized version of the wrong side of the tracks, a metaphorical rubble of bus stations, cheap motels, and, ultimately, prisons and mental institutions. The rubble became literal in his second novel: hell in Fiskadoro was a post-Armageddon wasteland—Key West after the nuclear holocaust—where the only route to salvation turned out to be the annihilation of memory. And in The Stars at Noon, a kind of surrealist farce (and the closest thing to a comedy Johnson has written), hell was Nicaragua in 1984, an atmosphere so compromised by corruption and moral confusion that any attempt to perform a decent, honest act was rendered futile.

With these three novels, Johnson established himself as one of the most serious and provocative writers of his generation. Not only were the books written in a vivid, almost hallucinatory style that was in itself a substantial achievement, they were also ambitious. Unlike many writers his age, Johnson was not content merely to present a depraved world, call it America, and wait for the royalty checks to roll in. His early work, Fiskadoro in particular, went beyond that kind of static revelation, manifesting a keen interest in how the religious impulse—the human inclination toward transcendence—operates in such a context of spiritual catastrophe.

These implied religious concerns have become explicit in his latest book. Resuscitation of a Hanged Man begins by mapping out another of Johnson's hells, but this one, the seaside resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts, during the off-season, is perhaps his oddest, most idiosyncratic version so far. Johnson is probably aware that this particular choice of hell may at first glance seem too heavily ironic and perhaps slightly homophobic (given the demographics of the town), but what interests him about Provincetown is its quality of social and sexual indefiniteness. As he depicts it, Provincetown, “the last town in America” and “the end of the line,” is a fundamentally bewildering place where all manner of distinctions break down—where men dress as women, women as men, and everyone seems to have two or three unrelated part-time jobs, eluding definition at every turn. Lacking any clear and harmonious chain of being, Provincetown is emphatically not the City of God.

Into this setting Johnson introduces a character for whom such an atmosphere of doubt can only lead to trouble—an impressionable, deeply disturbed young man with a sharp need for spiritual certainty. Leonard English, a 34-year-old orphan from Lawrence, Kansas, arrives on the peninsula one night in the reckless, violent style that has become trademark for this author. Having stopped for a few drinks in a town along the road (its hopelessness beautifully and efficiently suggested by images of empty shopping centers and boarded-up seafood stands), English drinks himself numb and proceeds to smash his Volkswagen into a traffic island on a lonely stretch of highway. A local cabdriver appears at his bloody shoulder and tells him, perhaps too prophetically: “You made a wrong turn.” Neither English nor the reader will ever think of disputing this.

In the course of the book's first section, Johnson reveals his protagonist's twofold purpose in coming to the Cape. English is here to start one of those hybrid Provincetown jobs as a radio announcer cum private investigator, but also, more important, to recover from a botched suicide attempt. In a moment of weakness, it seems, English once tried to hang himself, for reasons that he can't seem to articulate or even understand. He is a Catholic, but a Catholic in crisis, unable to make the cleansing confession that would free him of his sin. So he is floundering, as all of Johnson's ingenues flounder, in God's shadow, just out of sight of the countenance he aches to see but cannot find:

[English] didn't pray anymore for faith, because he'd found that a growing certainty of the Presence was accompanied by a terrifying absence of any sign or feeling or manifestation of it. He was afraid that what he prayed to was nothing, only this limitless absence. I'll grow until I've found you, and you won't be there.

To speak of English as an ingenue may strike some readers as rather ingenuous in itself. The character does, after all, drink himself into a stupor at every opportunity, and he's not above smashing windows, stealing passports, and committing the occasional illegal entry. But English is a spiritual innocent, ripe for manipulation by the outside world. He possesses a type of consciousness that has become alarmingly common in recent fiction—a mind of confused impressions and inarticulate needs, subject to the exigencies of the moment (or, as Johnson puts it, “a brain where everything fizzes and nothing connects”). This particular kind of character is all too often used as an author's crutch, a facile symbol of an incoherent world, but Johnson finds in English's fizzing brain the perfect laboratory for the kind of experiment he wants to conduct. The important difference between English and the garden-variety zoned-out cipher is that English's inability to connect is accompanied by an almost unbearably intense need to connect. It is a religious impulse turned pathological. And it is what ultimately turns English into a monster.

Johnson is able to push his character's ominously suggestible mind to extremes by throwing English headlong into the nebulous complexities of Provincetown. During his first weeks in town, English falls in with a series of acquaintances—a morally dubious employer named Ray Sands, a cabdriver who subscribes to theories of extraterrestrial interference, a burned-out alcoholic radio announcer—who only intensify his feelings of confusion and doubt. Even more disorienting is his romance with Leanna Sousa, an attractive lesbian whom he meets in church on his first day in Provincetown. English becomes infatuated with her, and Leanna, surprisingly (and not quite credibly), encourages his attentions, at the same time distancing him by carrying on an affair with another woman.

The scenes between English and Leanna—ambiguous, offbeat, sometimes infuriating, and often strangely exhilarating—are typical of the book's peculiar sensibility, perhaps best described as a sort of post-“Twin Peaks” semicomic absurdity. Johnson's aim is to suggest the chaotic muddle into which English has wandered, and in that he succeeds. The danger he faces in depicting such arbitrary and gratuitous oddness, however, is to seem arbitrarily and gratuitously odd himself. It's a familiar pitfall in a certain strain of contemporary fiction, with its fashionably bizarre characters whose actions seem motivated primarily by a desire to reveal the eccentric and subversive genius of their creators. But Johnson is after something more interesting than the revelation of the alleged dark corruption at the heart of the American psyche. He uses the absurdity and the corruption as a starting point, not as ends in themselves, wishing instead to probe his character's efforts to engage the chaos and force it into some kind of meaning.

Frustrated by the absence of any tangible signs of God's reclamation of him, English becomes more and more desperate as the book progresses. Two crucial events push him over the edge of mere depression into a kind of psychosis—witnessing Ray Sands's freak and fatal heart attack (the most terrifying scene in the book), and being kidnapped one night (apparently by mistake), interrogated, beaten, and left on the street to bleed. These galvanizing events have the effect of undermining the last remnants of English's already shaky sense of reality. He begins to believe that his torment is God's way of preparing him for something, the purpose he is yearning for: “Right now he almost had the power to say that he'd really killed himself. That his life on earth had stopped and then started somewhere else—here, now. That he'd hung himself, died, and been brought here to wait for God's word. God's charge, the task that would bring Lenny English back from the dark.”

English begins to sense in the white noise around him subtle hints of a conspiracy, a plot centering around something called the Truth Infantry, an obscure paramilitary organization of which his late boss was apparently the head. This conspiracy, he decides, is the medium by which God is sending his message. Johnson skillfully suggests that all of the seemingly related events—the kidnapping, the disappearance of a young man named Gerald Twinbrook, the secret and vaguely sinister friendship of Ray Sands and the local bishop—may actually be unrelated, coincidental, threaded into coherence by a mind needy for meaning. But English experiences an almost physical compulsion to find his mission in these loose ends. And when the voice in his head (his inner rebop, he calls it) begins to assume the shape of a terrible command, English is forced to enter into some dangerous speculation:

What if a person heeded all such inner rebop, would he be damned or saved? How quickly would a person's life progress along its lines if he followed every impulse as if it started from God? How much more quickly would he be healed? Or how much faster destroyed? Saints had done that. Also mass killers, and wreakers of a more secret mayhem, witches and cultists and vampires. …

The mention of saints, cultists, and mass killers in the same breath broaches a central preoccupation of the novel. Johnson (like Thomas Pynchon, a writer whose influence is evident throughout) is troubled by the slender boundary separating paranoia and a belief in any kind of mission or purpose—or, for that matter, a belief in any external meaning whatsoever. The discernment of meaning, of course, is a selection process. We select certain elements from our perceptions and define them as significant, as an expression of coherent intention. But what governs this selection in a context of chaos, where no self-evident hierarchy of experience exists? And what makes one selection a delusion and the other an inspiration? Simone Weil, who is alluded to frequently throughout the book, interpreted her message as an injunction to starve herself to death, in response to the deaths of millions of people in Hitler's camps. Was this a simple delusion? If it was not, what made it something more?

These are the questions that English asks himself once he becomes firmly convinced that there is indeed a web—a many-tentacled conspiracy—at the center of which lies Andrew, the bishop. English, his brain making connections at last, decides that the bishop is the dragon that he, the self-professed knight of faith, must slay. That is the act of faith that will turn God's face back to him. He still has enough of his wits to recognize this act as insane, but would God ask him to do anything sane? “Did He come to Elijah and say, Go, secure a respectable position and wear out your days in the chores of it?” If the task were easy to justify, he reasons, it wouldn't require the defining leap of faith.

Johnson has successfully woven the thread of suspense through his novel, and I don't want to give away the ending. Suffice it to say that English ultimately decides to heed his inner rebop. The book closes with the most disturbing of Johnson's nightmare apotheoses: sleepless, dressed in a mélange of men's and women's clothing, and armed with a stolen gun, English steers a leaky boat toward the figure of the bishop on the Provincetown pier. And in answering what he believes to be God's call, he transforms himself into an utterly new kind of creature: a knight of faith after all, a saint for the new millennium in America.

Clearly, nobody will ever accuse Denis Johnson of lacking brashness. If there are moments, as I've suggested, when he skates along the edge of some major problems, that's no surprise, given the leaps he is interested in making. By obscuring the line between religion and psychosis in an atmosphere of chaos, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man raises large doubts about the possibility of faith in any world like our own, where “there [is] no telling the difference between up and down, wrong and right, between sex and love, men and women, even between the living and the dead.” My old pastor would probably be appalled.