Mine Canary in a Noxious World : RESUSCITATION OF A HANGED MAN, <i> By Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 257 pp.)</i>

Lenny English is a mine canary. Long before the miners feel it, he flutters and expires to announce: The air’s gone bad; it will not sustain life.

In Denis Johnson’s wonderfully well-ventilated novel about the bad air of our times, Lenny doesn’t quite die. But at the start, he is recovering from a suicide attempt; at the end, he is in jail. That is close enough.

Furthermore, Lenny possesses not only the canary’s useful dying traits but its purling morning voice as well. Though Johnson’s book is very dark, it doesn’t seem so. It is written with too much tenderness, with leaps that are as nervy as a mountain goat’s, and landings that are as sure-footed and still.

Month by month, year by year and seemingly forever, we have been getting the bad news. All the handy and agreeable things of modern life undermine life. Apples (Mylar), cheap food (carcinogenic pesticides and preservatives), hair dryers and electric clocks (electrical radiation), beach vacations (ultraviolet rays), cars and aerosol sprays (global warming), cars again (oil dependency, Gulf wars, news-analyst burnout).

As for Lenny, a nice, squarish, 30-ish Midwesterner who comes East, his field is human and divine order. The spiritual conveniences, shortcuts, flexibilities and fudge of contemporary life make him ill. He does not judge them--he is all openness and yearning--but they make him ill.

He arrives by beat-up Volkswagen in Provincetown, the artistic, gay-and-lesbian, free-form life style and tourist haven on Cape Cod’s fishhook. It is winter, foggy and off-season. “So much was off,” Johnson writes. “All bets were off. The last deal was off. His timing was off, or he wouldn’t have come here at this moment, and also every second arc lamp along the peninsular highway was switched off.”

Lenny comes from Kansas to take up a double part-time job offered him by Sands, a Provincetown businessman. He will act as occasional disc jockey on Sand’s radio station, and become an investigator for his detective agency. Perhaps it will be a new life; he had tried to end the previous one by hanging himself.

It was a protest over his job. He was a salesman and loved the work, the contacts and the people. What he couldn’t abide was the product he was selling: surgical equipment.

That may sound like an odd thing to object to, but Lenny had seen the equipment demonstrated on animals in the manufacturer’s labs. They were near the airport; while dogs were being sliced up, he could hear jets landing. “That an airport could go about its gigantic business in the same world as this laboratory seemed impossible unless . . . all things conspired consciously to do perfect evil,” Lenny had thought despairingly.

Deadly means for convenient ends; a society out of touch with itself, with its values, with God. Lenny, an occasionally practicing Catholic, tries to find something that abides, but everything slips away. Nothing is what it seems. And in Provincetown, with its transvestite bars and gay couples, he feels he has arrived in a kind of temple to nothing being what it seems.

“Resuscitation of a Hanged Man” is about Lenny’s efforts to penetrate “seems” and get to “is.” “A knight of faith” he calls himself half-jokingly, and Johnson creates in him a character as winning, futile and even heroic as that other Knight of the Woeful Countenance, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Lenny seeks reality in a relativistic world, as Don Quixote sought giants in windmills. He lands in much the same up-ended posture.

Lenny’s quest takes him on an erratic and cloudy adventure. This is his effort to untangle what he comes to believe is a far-right conspiracy by a shadowy group called the Truth Infantry that conducts summer exercises in a New Hampshire camp. Sands has assigned him to trace a painter who has disappeared. Among his papers, Lenny discovers a reference to the Infantry. And after Sands dies of a heart attack, he hears gossip that his former boss was himself the head of the group.

Investigating, he is, at one point, abducted, roughed up, questioned by a middle-aged man in an enormous carnival hat, and then released. He goes to New Hampshire and discovers the painter’s body hanged.

Perhaps he hanged himself. It is never entirely clear whether what Lenny is after is a conspiracy or simply a group of middle-aged Boy Scouts playing at conspiracy. The latter, no doubt, but Lenny can’t be sure, nor can we. His shaky search provides both suspense and comedy. And beyond that, it provides a moving portrait of a hungry soul in a world of spiritual junk food. Is the whole universe a conspiracy? Where is God? Is God the chief conspirator? The climax of Lenny’s adventures is an attempt to assassinate the local Catholic bishop who, Lenny believes, may be the man behind the Infantry.

A conspiracy, in fact, would be a relief. Worse than that is aimlessness, entropy, the failure of anything to keep its shape. Johnson seems, at first glance, to have written a classic absurdist, high-gloss novel of contemporary paranoia. In fact, he has written a much older kind of classic with a hero who is a genuine seeker, a touching innocent somewhere in mid-space among Candide, Alice in Wonderland and Zippy.

Lenny’s pursuit of conspiracy and God in a post-modern world that has a hard time sustaining either one--there is a comically inconclusive confession to a priest who is too broad-minded to get to the point of absolution--provides the conspicuous action. But the heart of the book is his lovely, lightly doomed affair with Leanna.

It is love across a chasm. If Lenny is the Montague of single-minded authenticity, Leanna is the Capulet of polymorphous relativity. Both are innocents, but where Lenny is the child of Immanence, Leanna is the child of her time. And place. As she tells Lenny as he runs up to her after Mass and asks for a date: “Not me. I’m strictly P-town.” Gay, in other words, she tells this fresh arrival from Kansas. “You don’t look gay,” he protests. “Isn’t that against the law? It’d be easier if you gave some indication.”

And from there ensues a marvelously weighted and inflected courtship. Johnson has a dramatist’s gift for dialogue that advances, skids, retreats, disappears underground and reemerges. We know more than the characters do, but we know it from what they say, not from what the author says.

They get through the fences in spite of themselves. They make love, they are in love. It is the same love, but they can’t conceive of it the same way. Lenny wants commitment; Leanna wants to keep her female lovers; yet it’s more than a matter of desire. She can’t understand what commitment might be. “Why is it you? Why isn’t it anyone else?” she asks in bed with Lenny.

It is heart-rending; it is the touch of one of the finest American novelists writing today. Johnson, author of the magical novel of a time after the nuclear holocaust--”Fiskadoro”--has written another book, perhaps equally remarkable and more perfectly executed.

Like Stanley Elkin and Don DeLillo at their best, Johnson has not simply created a powerfully comedic and frightening world of disconnection and the absurd. In Lenny and Leanna, he gives us two human companions in it; a doubled Virgil to lead us through a modern Purgatory which, for all we know, may be all the Inferno we are likely to get.