A dazzling and savage first novel’ New York Times
Angels tells the story of two born losers. Jamie has ditched her husband and is running away with her two baby girls. Bill is dreaming of making it big in a life of crime. They meet on a Greyhound bus and decide to team up.
So begins a stunning, tragic odyssey through the dark underbelly of America – the bars, bus stations, mental wards, and prisons that play host to Jamie and Bill as they find themselves trapped in a downward spiral though rape, alcohol, drugs and crime, to madness and death.
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VINE VOICE
3.0 out of 5 stars A three month old baby and two tickets to Hershey
Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2022
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Recently I read a novel by Louise Erdrich about a book store worker who was haunted by the ghost of an erasable customer. In an addendum, she recommended the worker’s favorite book. Denis Johnson got at least two of his books on the list, and she didn’t even mention TREE OF SMOKE, the one I was familiar with.
ANGELS is supposed to be Johnson’s first book. It’s really noirish. A young mother is leaving her husband with a toddler and a three month old baby in tow on a Greyhound bus. She meets this loser, Bill Houston, on the bus. She has a ticket to Hershey, Pennsylvania, where her sister lives. Instead she follows the loser all the way to Arizona. He has been married three times with a stint in prison. We see him mug a Hardware store clerk and empty the cash register. I wanted to say, “What the heck do you think you’re doing, lady?”
When they get to Arizona we’re introduced to these other weirdos. Burris and James are Bill’s brothers. Burris is a drug addict; James is a repo man who gets into a gun fight with a man who has a machine gun.
When Jamie May, the woman, gets loopy Bill gives her pills. She pops them like M&M’s, ultimately ending up in a mental hospital. Bill might be the way he is because his mother is a religious nut. He also has a sister-in-law who quotes some New Age guru as a counter balance to her mother-in-law’s Biblical quotes. They take care of the kids while Jamie is in the hospital. Poor babies.
The reader will wonder exactly what Johnson is trying to say here, if anything at all. It comes a bit clearer when we see Bill Houston on death row. I won’t say how he got there, but you can guess. He doesn’t know what hit him. He’s sorry for what he did. He’s in there with another loser who murdered four children. The guard tells him the other guy will get the gas chamber, and the governor will give him a reprieve because the public won’t allow two executions in one day. One of them does get the gas. I won’t say which, but you can guess.
Philip Roth calls this book “A small masterpiece. . .prose of amazing power and stylishness.” I couldn’t get past the three month old baby and the two tickets to Hershey.
Poet, playwright and author Denis Johnson Author Of Angels pdf Book was born in Munich, West Germany, in 1949 and was raised in Tokyo, Manila and Washington. He earned a masters’ degree from the University of Iowa and received many awards for his work, including a Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993), a Whiting Writer’s Award (1986), the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from the Paris Review for Train Dreams, and most recently, the National Book Award for Fiction (2007).
You Can get A Copy Of Angels pdf Or Paperback By Denis Johnson from these online stores below.
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