SOURCE: Krist, Gary. “Cape Hell.” New Republic 204, no. 22 (3 June 1991): 41–42.

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...