Denis Johnson writes about boredom and doom, about early-morning twilight and the taste of hangover in the mouth. His characters may inhabit small Latin American republics, or a post-apocalyptic future, or merely the prisons, bars and bus stations of a contemporary USA, but they share a country of the mind, a country more like an anxiety dream than a full-blown nightmare. Nothing works out right for these characters, and the things that go wrong do so with a repetitiveness that comes to seem achingly inevitable.

[In Resuscitation of a Hanged Man,] Leonard English tried to kill himself in revulsion from his job as a medical instrument salesman, with the vivisection of animals as a sales pitch; his attempts to live a life without cruelty involve him in the bad faith of work as a private detective, reducing the complexities of other people's lives to bits of information he can report to his boss and his clients. The same boss employs him as a disc-jockey, a job to which he is almost equally ill-suited—English sits in an almost empty studio in the hours before dawn, judging music by how much of his shift it can fill. The boss, who soon dies suddenly, is called Sands, the substance on which English builds his life.

Even after Sands's death, English continues, intermittently, with the assignments Sands gave him, wrapping his empty life around them. He pursues Leanna, the lover of the woman he was trailing; Leanna grants him some sexual favours out of compassion, while refusing him a commitment he is not entitled to ask for. He searches for the missing artist Twinbrook, and eventually finds his body; out of a few suspicions about survivalist vigilantes, he erects a fragile paranoid structure which leads him to a final bizarre act. When we last see him, English is in jail, occasionally visited by Leanna and avidly consuming cigarettes and carbohydrates; for the first time, his life is under a sort of control, if a perverse one.

The problem with this novel is the problem intrinsic to novels whose protagonist is seriously mentally ill; none of the other characters has all that much chance of living clearly when seen through his distorting eyes. Life seems arbitrary to the viewpoint character, because it is made up of the autonomous choices of people whom he cannot control and whose motivations he cannot begin to accept or understand. Johnson's portrayal of the madness of English depends so heavily on the portrayal of his egocentricity that it becomes almost moralistic, yet none of the other characters is ever allowed to be more than a counter in the plot.

Johnson does his usual skilled job of showing us the world that surrounds his protagonist—off-season Provincetown with its gay bars, fishing-boats and slightly vulgar resort charm—but he sets out to make the jaundiced eye with which English regards everything just another symptom of his disorder. We both see the world in this queasy way, and are made to feel guilty about doing so. Because of his sheer pictorial sense and his capacity to build a plot out of wisps of dialogue and incident, Johnson has the capacity to be a rewarding novelist, but the unrelieved air of gloomy disapproval shrouding Resuscitation of a Hanged Man leaves hero and reader alike feeling condemned, without hope of appeal.