SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Mine Canary in a Noxious World.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (3 March 1991): 3, 8.

In the following positive review, Eder evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, commenting that Johnson has a “dramatist's gift for dialogue.”

Lenny English is a mine canary. Long before the miners feel it, he flutters and expires to announce: The air's gone bad; it will not sustain life.

In Denis Johnson's wonderfully well-ventilated novel about the bad air of our times, [Resuscitation of a Hanged Man,] Lenny doesn't quite die. But at the start, he is recovering from a suicide attempt; at the end, he is in jail. That is close enough.

Furthermore, Lenny possesses not only the canary's useful dying traits but its purling morning voice as well. Though Johnson's book is very dark, it doesn't seem so. It is written with too much tenderness, with leaps...