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Angels: A Novel Paperback – April 30, 2002
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“A terrifying book, a mixture of poetry and obscenity. . . [the characters] are people who can’t be ignored. Mr. Johnson has written a dazzling and savage first novel.”—Alice Hoffman, New York Times Book Review
The most critically acclaimed, and first, of Denis Johnson's novels, Angels puts Jamie Mays—a runaway wife toting along two kids—and Bill Houston—ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con—on a Greyhound Bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their inescapable destination is a last stop marked by stunning violence and mind-shattering surprise.
Denis Johnson, known for his portraits of America's dispossessed, sets off literary pyrotechnics on this highway odyssey, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateApril 30, 2002
- Dimensions8.04 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
- ISBN-100060988827
- ISBN-13978-0060988821
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"[This] is the story of people who slip helplessly into their own worst nightmares. . . . 'Angels' is a terrifying book, a mixture of poetry and obscenity ... whether the characters are conversing with a dark angelor ordering a platter of french fries, they are people who can't be ignored.Mr. Johnson has written a dazzling and savage first novel." — Alice Hoffman, New York Times Book Review
"Acute, muscular, and quite relentless, Johnson, who is already a recognized poet, is about to write a major novel.... In this book there is the metaphysical bite, the eye for terrible detail, the grasp of character." — John Clute, Times Literary Supplement
"A beautiful book." — Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek
From the Back Cover
The most critically acclaimed, and first, of Denis Johnson's novels, Angels puts Jamie Mays -- a runaway wife toting along two kids -- and Bill Houston -- ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con -- on a Greyhound Bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their inescapable destination is a last stop marked by stunning violence and mind-shattering surprise.
Denis Johnson, known for his portraits of America's dispossessed, sets off literary pyrotechnics on this highway odyssey, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Angels
By Johnson, DenisPerennial
Copyright ©2004 Denis JohnsonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0060988827
Chapter One
In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they'd taken their seats. But Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she'd turn for a living to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can't talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two bands.
Jamie sat by the window looking out and smoking a Kool. People still crowded at the bus's door, people she hoped never to meet -- struggling with mutilated luggage and paper sacks that might have contained, the way they handled them, the reasons for their every regretted act and the justifications for their wounds. A black man in a tweed suit and straw hat held up a sign for his departing relatives: "THE SUN SHALL BE TURNED INTO DARKNESS AND THE MOON INTO BLOOD" (JOEL 2:31). Under the circumstances, Jamie felt close to this stranger.
Around three in the morning Jamie's eyes came open. Headlights on an entrance ramp cut across their flight and swept through the bus, and momentarily in her exhaustion she thought it was the flaming head of a man whipping like a comet through the sleeping darkness of these travellers, hers alone to witness. Suddenly Miranda was awake, jabbering in her ear, excited to be up past bedtime.
Jamie pushed the child's words away, afraid of the dark the bus was rushing into, confused at being swallowed up so quickly by her new life, fearful she'd be digested in a flash and spit out the other end in the form of an old lady too dizzy to wonder where her youth had gone. A couple of times she tried to shush Miranda, because the baby was sleeping and so was everyone else on the bus, except the driver, she hoped -- but Miranda had to nudge Baby Ellen with her foot every two seconds because she wanted to play, right in the middle of Nevada in the middle of the night. "Randy," Jamie said. "I'm tarred now, hon. Don't wake up Ellen now."
Miranda sat on her hands and pretended to sleep, secretly nudging Baby Ellen with her foot.
"Move your foot, hon," Jamie told her. "I ain't playing. Move your foot now."
Miranda feigned sleep and deafness, her foot jerking in a dream to jostle the baby.
"Move -- yer -- fut," Jamie whispered fiercely, and grabbed her ankle and moved it. "You behave. Or I'll tell the driver, and he'll take you and put you off the bus, right out there in that desert. Right in the dark, with the snakes. You hear me?" She jerked Miranda's foot away again. "Don't you play like you're asleep when I can see goddamn it you ain't!"
She stared with hatred at Miranda's closed eyes and soon realized the child had fallen asleep. The weightlessness of fear replaced the weight of anger as the bus sailed down the gullet the headlights made. She put her hand over her face and wept.
In a little while she fell asleep, and dreamed about a man drowning in a cloud of poison. She woke up and wondered if this was a dream about her husband, or what? -- a dream about the past, or a dream about the future?
Baby Ellen wouldn't stop screaming.
Jamie held her in one arm, searching beneath the seat with her free hand for the travelling bag, then in the travelling bag for Baby Ellen's orange juice. "There there there there there," she told Baby Ellen. "Have a crib for you soon, and a string to tie on your music box with, and Mama and Miranda'll come sing to you when it's bedtime, and here's your orange juice, thank goodness, there there there there there, little Baby Ellen, oh that a good orange juice, such a serious orange juice, such a serious look, oh, see the pretty sun? See the sun over there, Baby Ellen? That's just a little bitty part of the sun, pretty soon Baby Ellen see the whole sun and then it's morning time for Baby Ellen and Mama and Miranda Sue." She wished she could smother the baby. Nobody would know. They were four days out of Oakland.
She fed Baby Ellen her orange juice and watched the sun as it moved into prominence above the dead cornfields in Indiana, the light striking her face painfully as it ticked over the frozen pools and the rows of broken stalks glazed with ice. Her husband angrily sold stereophonic components for a living. He brooded on his life, and it grew on him until he was rattling around inside of it. Why couldn't she just be thankful to him, he always wanted to know, since he was losing track of what he wanted just so she could have everything she wanted? Couldn't she see how everything kept happening? It was just -- he pounded his fist on the wall so the small trailer shook -- one moment goes to the next... He choked her close to death twice, frantic to think she couldn't understand his complaint. And she couldn't. He slept almost every minute he was at home. At night, he cried and confessed how everything scared him. Whenever she looked at him he had his face in his arms, hiding from the pictures in his own brain. Finally he'd blown it, their whole marriage. She'd seen it coming like a red caboose at the end of a train.
Cut loose between Oakland and everything...
Continues...Excerpted from Angelsby Johnson, Denis Copyright ©2004 by Denis Johnson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 30, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060988827
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060988821
- Item Weight : 5.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.04 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #78,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #774 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #2,020 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #6,131 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Denis Hale Johnson (born July 1, 1949) is an American writer best known for his short story collection Jesus' Son (1992) and his novel Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the National Book Award for Fiction. He also writes plays, poetry and non-fiction.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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I've read criticisms of "Angels" bemoaning the sketchy take on the central characters, but I disagree that this is a failing. Johnson gives us enough for us to sympathize and, at times, empathize with his motley cast, and certainly enough to share in their everyday epiphanies, when they see the world fresh and new and each moment appears precious and, by the miracle of Johnson's poetic prose, we see out of their eyes.
Likewise criticism falls upon Bill Houston's fate as being somehow unemotional, but this very fact suggests that we are not simply being asked to consider the ethics of capital punishment, but also to dwell on our own, that is to say everyone's, inevitable fate - the blind certainty of our mortality.
The entire work questions the role of personal will versus that of circumstance in deciding the choices we make. I do not think that a pat answer is provided, instead the question is raised and investigated through the thoughts and deeds of Johnson's miscreants.
All of this is dressed in Johnson's universally praised and delicately wrought language. For me, this novel is a celebration of the power of words to first and foremost communicate - if we gain a window into the souls of "Angels"' lost protagonists, then how much easier to see inside our own, and inside those who surround us.
"She says, 'But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.'
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires."
In the following stanza, Stevens says:
"Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly."
On one level, Denis Johnson's first novel "Angels" (1983) could hardly be more different from Stevens' poem. Stevens and his character are erudite, highly educated, and well to do. The characters in Johnson's novel are drug users, alcoholics, and criminals all of whom are emeshed in poverty. They lack the rudiments of an education which would create interest in a writer such as Wallace Stevens.
Yet, there is a clear and often repeated allusion to Stevens' poem in "Angels". The final scene in Johnson's novel is set in a dismal prison in the Arizona desert where one of the primary characters, Bill Houston, is awaiting execution. The gas chamber in which Houston is to be executed bears the (unattributed) inscription "Death is the mother of beauty." Houston meditates on the meaning of this difficult phrase as he awaits his fate: and the haunting line becomes a way to get to think about Johnson's story.
"Angels" offers a gritty look at American low life in the 1980s. The two primary characters, Bill Houston and Jamie Mays, meet on a cross-country Greyhound bus from Oakland. Jamie has two small children and is fleeing her marriage in the hope of meeting up with her sister in Hershey, Pennsylvania. On the bus, she begins a relationship with Houston, an alcoholic ex-con and Navy veteran. The relationship takes the couple through the streets and bars of Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Phoenix and through much sleaze and violence. After Jamie is brutally raped in Chicago, she and Houston take the bus to Huston's family home in Phoenix. Huston, his two brothers, and another man attempt the heist of a large bank, in a scene reminiscent of many film noirs The heist goes awry and the four men are picked up. Bill Houston is tried for the killing of a guard. Jamie for her part suffers a nervous breakdown and is institutionalized. She works to become free of alcohol and substance addiction.
Johnson tells a story of grimness and sadness while showing as well an affection for his people with all their self-inflicted wounds. The book is less a cohesive novel than a series of interconnected vignettes. It succeeds in finding beauty in its characters and places through its writing. Like Stevens, Johnson is a poet who illuminates the lives he sees through writing and imagination. While in "Sunday Morning" Stevens saw the transience, beauty, and spirituality of life through the thoughts of a cultivated, beautiful woman, Johnson works to show these traits in the lives of his down and out characters.
Johnson is probably best known for his book "Jesus' Son" which I have read together with his late novella "Train Dreams". In many ways, the lurid beauty of "Angels" may capture Johnson at his best. I was glad to read this first novel and to think about it together with one of my favorite poems and poets.
Robin Friedman
Top reviews from other countries
He rightly described the penultimate chapter as one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing in modern literature.
I realise you might consider this some weak appeal to authority, but I just can't emphasise enough how magnificent an achievement Angels is.
I used to buy 1st edition UK paperback copies and the Faber hardback reissue for a quid or two back in the 90s. I'm now reduced to one battered old paperback as no-one I've lent it to has agreed to return it. If it was any other book I'd have been annoyed, to say the least, but I totally empathise. Don't deny yourself the experience. Vastly superior than the likes of the glib Raymond Carver he would occasionally be compared to, much of this is closer to Hubert Selby country.
Of his later books, I also hugely recommend the novella Train Dreams, his book of journalism Seek, and the collection of 2 plays, Shoppers Carried by Escalators into the Flames.
This is not the original paperback, but an on demand print done here in Japan.
There is a major problem with quality control.
The binding is very tight, and the text seems to be just a printout of the Kindle text, which means that the justification is not right. The text is too close to the fold, so it's actually difficult to read it like a regular book. Together with the low resolution of the cover artwork, the overall feeling is of a counterfeit copy.
I wouldn't mind if this version was cheaper, but it's the same price as a regular paperback, and there is no information about this in the description before you buy,
Reviewed in Japan on March 8, 2021
This is not the original paperback, but an on demand print done here in Japan.
There is a major problem with quality control.
The binding is very tight, and the text seems to be just a printout of the Kindle text, which means that the justification is not right. The text is too close to the fold, so it's actually difficult to read it like a regular book. Together with the low resolution of the cover artwork, the overall feeling is of a counterfeit copy.
I wouldn't mind if this version was cheaper, but it's the same price as a regular paperback, and there is no information about this in the description before you buy,
a really great short beach read.