Customer Reviews

Angels [With Headphones] (Playaway Adult Fiction)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Frankly, I am hard pressed to think of a better debut novel than "Angels." This ranks in quality of form and substance with, for instance, Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter" or "The End of the Affair," the kind of work one would expect in the middle portion of a writer's body of literature. Fans of Johnson's marvelous collection of short stories, "Jesus' Son," will find the pace and language of "Angels" more subdued (although depictions of rape and violence are utterly compelling) and the outrageously mordant humor, more or less, gone. Instead of shocking the reader with frequent brilliant well-timed and well-turned poetic metaphors, as he did with "Jesus' Son," here he allows the prose to develop more subtly--but with equally outstanding results. I find Johnson a somewhat curious author. Clearly, he is a literary genius--one of the great talents of the 20th century and quite possibly the best all-around living American writer. It is obvious in this novel as well as some others, including "Fiskadoro," "Resuscitation of a Hanged Man," and even "Stars at Noon." I get the feeling he could, if he wanted, easily achieve the popular status of, say, a Greene or Hemingway or Carver, but he obviously prefers to remain just slightly left of mainstream (although "Jesus' Son" and "Angels" are quite accessible). Whatever, this, like all of Johnson's works, is a richly rewarding experience. I hope he has many, many more to come.

In "Angels" I think Denis Johnson is focusing on the mystery of being a particular self, and questioning how much of the stuff that goes together to make a self is actually that person's own doing. His vehicle for this exploration is the underbelly of the USA, and here he taps into a tradition in American writing stretching through Kerouac, and Fante, Bukowski, Miller and Dreiser, and no doubt many others unfamiliar to me; in a way, a more distant echo is heard in Beckett and his tramps. The wonder of individual consciousness, the experience of subjectivity, is illuminated by making all the gaudy trappings of the world dark.

*

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.

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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.

Beaten down and living for the moment, Denis Johnson's characters scrape out a wretched life of drugs and alcohol, pipe-dreams, and daydreams.

_Angels_ is a world of bus depots and scurrilous strangers, of people who can scarcely see past the haze of their cigarettes. It is a lonely world of randomness and drift. Some might say Johnson's characters aren't "3D", but that's because they're so richly flat. And when Johnson takes us into Jamie's descent into madness, it is a mind-bending trip.

Yet somehow, Johnson's writing left me exhilerated and happy. I enjoyed this book immensely and had trouble putting it down--I would rank it among the best I've read over the last five years.

Johnson is one of our greatest and most underappreciated living authors (yes, underappreciated, even though he has been lavishly praised by critics). He isn't just capable of writing a good book or two, he's a classic talent, and it's obvious from his very first novel. Angels reads like an epic poem - every sentence is carefully weighed and effective, and a sense of character emerges even out of shattered impressions. The flawed characters are still somehow endearing, and the sense of dark and cryptic religion, from occultism to by-the-book Christianity, underpinned by Bob Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone,' is powerful. This book should be read and enjoyed; eventually, also, reprinted and remembered.

This is the first Denis johnson book I have read and probably will not be the last. The man can paint pictures with words, phrases and sentences. We experience the torrid nights in Arizona, the lonely bus rides across the country and feel the evil of men having they way with cast-away women. The sadness is most vividly revealed through the few children that dot the story.
I enjoy stories of people on the edge, desperate and without a clue of how to act beyond the first reaction and simplest action.
I did find parts of the story confusing as characters seemed to come and go without notice or explanation.
The ending is an excellent polemic on the death penalty.

The tragedy and doom that follows the characters of Johnson's first novel, as well as Johnson's gorgeous prose, make for one of the most compelling of all contemporary novels. This and Resusitation of a Hanged Man prove Johnson as a major writer with a unique literary vision. I've read this book four times, and each time found new elements to appreciate. My favorite contemporary work.

P.S. I originally posted this way back in '99, and have since changed my e-address, so I'm reposting it. I have since read many other of Johnson's works - including his poetry - and must admit to being somewhat disappointed in comparison to the achievement and intensity of this book and Resusitation. If you were to read only one of Johnson's works, this - moreso than anything else (including Jesus' Son) - is the one.

Extraordinary stuff lies herein. Deserves to be recognized as one of no more than ten novels that convincingly anatomize contemporary America--its provocations, its pieties, and its relentlessly broadcast promise of redemption through squalor. This was one of the first of the now-ballyhooed Vintage Contemporaries series, which recently issued an anthology of highlights from its fourteen-year history. Johnson was excluded, even though his first three novels were originally Vintage paperbacks; now "Angels" is the only book of his in the series. Sad to tell, alas, but not surprising. "Angels" belongs alongside Cormac McCarthy's "Child of God," Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood," and Robert Stone's "A Flag for Sunrise" (to which it pays homage in one extraordinary scene) as a seminal meditation on the nature of being lost and the extraordinary difficulty of "finding" anything.

The tragedy and doom that follows the characters of Johnson's first novel, as well as Johnson's gorgeous prose, make for one of the most compelling of all contemporary novels. This and Resusitation of a Hanged Man prove Johnson as a major writer with a unique literary vision. I've read this book four times, and each time found new elements to appreciate. My favorite contemporary work.

Johnson's compact masterpiece takes us into the land of America's dispossessed bastard children and the power of poetic beauty which comprises the small and great moments of their lives. What also impressed me was how believable all of these eclectic characters from nomadic mother, child serial killer, streetside scavengers, a religious fanatic, and good old fashioned American outlaws. Even more remarkable is Johnson's ability to segway from gritty realism into inspired poetry that brings to light the lost angellic souls that populate the American wastelands, shedding their wouded beauty upon pages, illuminating many truths.

In this first novel by the author, stark reality, messiness, pain, despair, and grit are shoveled out in spades. From the start, as Jamie Mays with her two young children is leaving her husband, at the Oakland bus station she sees the "dwarfs ... struggling with mutilated luggage and paper sacks that might have contained ... the reasons for their every regretted act and the justifications for their wounds." Her destination is her sister-in-law's house in Hershey, PA. Her general apprehension is palpable: "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." Her observations and intimations at the start are mere hints at the course her life will take in the next few months.

Jamie never makes it to Hershey. She meets Bill Houston on the bus, a big guy with a kindly grin and a certain appeal, but is an ex-con, ex-sailor, drifter, wise guy, and alcohol abuser - living life on the margins. She is intrigued enough, aided by smuggled beer and uppers and downers on the bus, to stay with him in Pittsburgh. When he takes off for Chicago, demonstrating clearly the bleakness of her life, she tracks him down. Of course, money woes are a constant, driving all manner of survival strategies: pimping Jamie, robbery of a small hardware store, and, more ominously, armed robbery of a bank.

Their downward slide is accelerated in Phoenix, where Bill meets his completely dysfunctional family. Lives unravel and change in this book, stupidity abounds, yet the author's approach is far more an attempt to appreciate his characters' situations and decisions than it is to condemn. Both Jamie and Bill have a certain awareness and acceptance of choices made and obstacles faced; they retain some dignity despite their travails and even reprehensible acts. The book in no way romanticizes their lives; it is a pretty clear-eyed, legitimate look at life on the other side with its myriad difficulties and psychological toll and strategies. The author's language is sharp and unrelenting.