SOURCE: Elie, Paul. “The Shape of Distant Things.” Commonweal 118, no. 15 (13 September 1991): 522–23.

In the following positive review, Elie praises Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, noting that “few novels have rendered so well the zany nobility of life on the edge.”

“There's really only one question,” says Leonard English, the protagonist of Denis Johnson's fourth novel. “Did God really kill himself?” What his new friend wants to know is: “Did it feel sexy when you killed yourself? When you were hanging, did you come?” Overlook the dodgy theology; forget that these aren't the questions you generally ask on a first date in a coffee shop. Accept that Resuscitation of a Hanged Man is willfully unorthodox, aggressively out of the ordinary. Though it probably will provoke many readers with its sensationalistic premises or its unyielding sexual politics, it is clearly a work of religious art—the odd contemporary novel that dares...