SOURCE: Kaveney, Roz. “The Hours before Dawn.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4609 (2 August 1991): 18.

In the following negative review of Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Kaveney finds shortcomings in what he perceives as the novel's jaded perspective and hopelessness.

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...