Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

...The accomplishments of the Carter administration in foreign policy have never received adequate recognition from U.S...

...Press freedom gained substantial ground and a national debate got underway in every nondemocratic state (except Cuba) regard- ing the abuses of the regimes under which they lived and the need for political free- dom if bloody revolution was to be avoid- ed...

...To its credit Exporting Democracy does ask the fight questions and come up with the correct answers...

...The leading hanged man is English--a nervy, vaguely Catholic, Kansas-born drifter who knows himself as "one of those men in their thirties with- out much to recommend them" and who strikes others as "kind of always in the wrong lane...

...As I read history, only one succeeded--Jimmy Carter...

...scholars...

...The leaders and peoples THE SHAPE OF DISTANT THINGS of Latin America have always had the will and the capacity to transform their countries into democratic nations...

...In the long run, those who share our common principles of freedom are the best guarantee of stability and har- mony in the Americas...

...Elections were scheduled in Honduras and Peru...

...When you were hanging, did you come...

...Work, for English, is a pair of squalid jobs--as a jack-of- all-trades at a small radio station and as a detective for its owner, Ray Sands...

...Yet Exporting Democracy, which gives over an entire chapter to "The Reagan Years" substan- tially ignores the presidency of Jimmy Carter and his human rights policy...

...What his new friend wants to know is: "Did it feel sexy when you killed yourself...

...Paul Elie 6 here's really only one question," says Leonard English, the protagonist of Denis Johnson's fourth novel...

...In Latin America, however, democratic leaders saw in the Carter human rights policy the promise of a new rela- tionship where our actions did not regularly give the lie to our words...

...Somoza was thrown out of Nicaragua and in E1 Salvador a reform government and the revolutionaries moved haltingly toward negotiation...

...With this action the United States left the path of judicious application of diplo- matic influence and respect for sovereignty, juridical equality, and territorial integrity...

...Accept that Resuscitation of a Hanged Man is will- fully unorthodox, aggressively out of the ordinary...

...But the place he has come to is the "phony peninsula" of Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the off season...

...What they could not do is to achieve democracy over our opposition...

...Since World War II, no president has failed to announce that his priority for Latin America was to advance democracy...

...RESUSCITATION OF A HANGED MAN Denis Johnson Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $19.95, 257 pp...

...Love comes to him at first sight, for a woman he spots in church--but Leanna Sousa, in one of the bursts of idiom that give the novel its truth and life, tells him she is "strictly P-town...

...As its title implies, the novel is crammed full of morbid, paradoxical deaths and rebirths...

...Overlook the dodgy theology...

...During Carter's term of office the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Bolivia returned to constitutional government...

...labor and to have no sep- arate discussions of the roles of the U.S...

...business and U.S...

...Although only applied intermittent- ly and with great variations from country to country, the Carter human rights policy had profound and beneficial effects throughout the region...

...With its shuttered resorts, its fog and wind, and its populace of Vietnam vets and cross-dressing homosexuals and parishioners "lugging themselves like laundry toward the big doors of the church," the town has "every quality of the end of the line...

...Having survived a bungled "try at self-murder" a few months back, he has come East to try, through work and love and the sheer act of starting over, to put his life together again...

...military and the CIA is to confuse sub- sidiary forces of occasional importance with primary actors which, either separate- ly or together, have held the whip hand over key elements of U.S...

...Barbaric practices of mass murder, institutionalized torture, and officially sponsored disappearances practically came to an end everywhere except E1 Salvador, Guatemala, and Chile...

...We still have not learned there is no basis for democracy when we support governments that manip- ulate their peoples for the benefit of a tiny domestic elite...

...As he trails her to a cabaret where people remake themselves as transvestites, as he eaves- drops on the lovers in bed by means of a mike-and-fishing-pole device, he thinks that his own attempt to remake himself in this seaside town has run aground: "He 522: Commonweal...

...forget that these aren't the questions you generally ask on a first date in a coffee shop...

...a relationship which permitted Latin Americans to devel- op their own institutions in their own way, a relationship in which the United States helped Latin American states to move toward democracy...

...To devote an entire chapter each to U.S...

...policy toward the region for decades...

...In place of these principles that have served as the accepted basis of international con- duct among independent states, the United States directed the preponderance of its resources toward strengthening the Latin American military establishments and fighting an ill-defined communism, usually designated as subversion, through over- staffed military missions, huge CIA sta- tions, and public-safety programs...

...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 to yoke those words together and bear their double burden...

...Did God really kill himself...

...English's first task as a detective, it turns out, is to spy on Leanna's lover...