Reading Rainbow: Resuscitation of a Hanged Man by Denis Johnson

My last run-in with Denis Johnson in full, novel form was with the 2007 National Book Award winner Tree of Smoke. Personally, I felt like the sprawl engendered all the wrong feelings, and rather than reading like some wild work of genius, it was a mess of a book. It was not a beautiful mess.

His novella Train Dreams was fantastic, and the short story collection Jesus' Son was entirely deserving of the mounds of praise that have been heaped upon it. My experience then with Johnson had been that his pieces that required less extended focus for him were thrilling while the full novel I'd read was an overrated borderline clusterfuck.

Upon finally wading back into the world of the full Denis Johnson novel with Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, my trepidation regarding Denis Johnson the novelist was proven to have been completely unfounded. This time around the reader is treated to a first-person narrative from the point-of-view of the scarred, outsider protagonist, Leonard English, who moves to gay haven Provincetown, Massachusetts, to split time between working at a radio station and helping the station owner, Ray Sands, with his private investigation side business.

Awkward at nearly every turn, unable to connect on any meaningful level with just about everyone with whom he comes into contact, English makes for an unique lead in what is at least primarily a private eye novel. I say "primarily" because we are talking about Denis Johnson here, and Johnson definitely puts his own spin on the conventions of the genre. Leonard watches his subjects from the periphery rather than more directly engaging with them. The case--and life--is happening around him, but much like the reader his involvement is limited to that of the spectator. When Leonard does attempt to take action, it generally doesn't go well for him.

The book itself is really damn good. It sits down in a genre I love and deftly subverts its conventions. Johnson's prose is simultaneously propulsive and impressive, alive and jumping from the page. Despite its humbler aims, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man stands well above his more recent bemedaled tome.

Reading Rainbow: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Having read and loved the classic short story collection Jesus' Son and the collection of reportage Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond only to be left puzzled as to why Tree of Smoke was awarded the 2007 National Book Award upon finishing that laborious and unrewarding tome, I had no idea what to expect with Train Dreams, a novella that first appeared in print in The Paris Review in 2002 only to not get a proper hardcover release until 2011 when Farrar, Straus and Giroux went to press with it.

Cover art by my possible kinfolk, Thomas Hart Benton

An exceptionally quick and easy read, Train Dreams bore none of the turgidity present in Tree of Smoke, a notable feat given the fact that much of Robert Grainier's life story is told with efficacy and brevity in a scant 116 pages. The book dreamily jumps around episodically through Grainier's life, a day laborer who lives out most of his life in the panhandle of Idaho (some takes place in nearby Washington, as well) as the Pacific Northwest begins its transition from the wild frontier it begins the first half of the Twentieth Century as. Train Dreams is not beholden to a linear narrative. There is a certain logic to it all, of course, and the stories that pertain to his wife and daughter are mostly beholden to a least a loose sense of linear chronology, but Johnson's novella follows a freer path.

The story of Robert Grainier  is an interesting one. From his murky beginnings to his relatively brief marriage to his later hermitic life, Grainier's life cast against the raw, wild backdrop of a Pacific Northwest still heavily influenced by the Kootenai's mystical roots that still had hold in the area is fascinating. The hard life he leads, heavily at the mercy of the harsh climes and geography of the region, and the resultant spartan lifestyle the land mandates is perfectly rendered in the lean, direct prose through which his tale is told. While there are tragic elements to Grainier's story, Johnson manages to avoid getting bogged down in tragedy, as in this environment these otherwise tragic events are simply a fact of life and treated as such. Just as everything in Grainier's life had utility, Johnson wastes few words in recounting his life, and its effectiveness without approaching being affected is astonishing.

For those wondering where this week's Wordy Old Men on Downton Abbey is, we hope to have that up tomorrow. There have been computer issues that have held it up. As for yesterday's contentlessness, I apologize. I've come down with something, and I passed out really early Monday night. I wish I were dead right now.