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Angels Denis Johnson 9780099440833 Books

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Angels Denis Johnson 9780099440833 Books

There are a handful of powerful episodes in Denis Johnson's debut novel, ANGELS. Among them is the 5:00 a.m. execution at the Arizona State Prison Complex at the end of the novel. The episode begins with a description of those who had come in their campers, motorcycles, and pick-ups and gathered across the highway from the prison to "seek warmth around the fire of murder". They were "mostly the very people who'd be incarcerated here tomorrow, goodtimers in sleeveless sweatshirts and teeshirts vulgarly inscribed ('The Itty Bitty Titty Committee')--slogans without meaning, transmissions into space--Honk If You Know Jesus and National Rifle Association bumper emblems nearly effaced by wind-driven sand--the children grubby and crew-cut, the women splayfooted and rubber-thonged--where were the young ladies apparelled for tennis, apparrelled for golfing? Where were the outraged owners of the establishment? The bankers, the people with tie-pins and jeweled letter openers and profoundly lustrous desks of mahogany, the workers of all this machinery of law and circumstance? * * * The truth was * * * that they had enough to keep them occupied. They were busy, complete people. They didn't need to come here in the dark night to seek warmth around the fire of murder or draw close to the ceremonies of a semi-public death."

The angels of the novel are the down and out, the human debris of America. Those who travel cross-country in a Greyhound bus. Those who sell their plasma for lunch money. Those who habitually seek the blurring of reality, whether by alcohol, pills, or heroin. Those who live on a "curbless street lined with wheelless hotrod automobiles on cinderblocks". And those who seek comfort and meaning in the wackier, Satan-dominated efflorescences of Christianity.

As John Steinbeck described the Okies of the 1930s, Denis Johnson describes the flotsam and jetsam of America circa 1980. Five of them are front and center. One is Jamie Mays, who fled Oakland for no certain destination with her two young children after she found, late at night, her husband sneaking out of the nearby trailer home of her best friend, clad only in panties. The other four are the Houstons of Phoenix, Arizona: Mrs. Houston, seventy, originally from red-dirt Oklahoma, her second husband in the state pen, living from one Social Security check to the next, dutifully reading the Bible and seeing fortune tellers and trying to use their utterances to make sense of the world; and her three sons -- Bill, Jr., James, and Burris, who usually go their separate ways in one sort or another of alcohol- or drug-induced fog, but who team up under the direction of a criminal mastermind to rob the Central Avenue First State Bank in broad daylight. And that's when their lives really start going down the crapper. (The four Houstons also appear in Johnson's "Tree of Smoke", although there it is about ten years earlier in their lives.)

Most of us would tend to regard the characters who populate ANGELS as sorry losers. The special merit of the novel is to reveal their humanity without glossing over their sorriness . . . and to suggest that perhaps they are closer to the truth.


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Angels Denis Johnson 9780099440833 Books Reviews

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.
The dark, delirious, deranged, and demented grit of this novel may have been impossible to write had Denis Johnson not lived it before becoming clean and sober. The characters don't leads lives of quiet desperation. Rather, they rush headlong, however unwittingly, down paths of delusive despair.

Reading this book is an act of daring — daring to take it on and daring to accept the fact that one person's horror is another person's reality.
There are a handful of powerful episodes in Denis Johnson's debut novel, ANGELS. Among them is the 500 a.m. execution at the Arizona State Prison Complex at the end of the novel. The episode begins with a description of those who had come in their campers, motorcycles, and pick-ups and gathered across the highway from the prison to "seek warmth around the fire of murder". They were "mostly the very people who'd be incarcerated here tomorrow, goodtimers in sleeveless sweatshirts and teeshirts vulgarly inscribed ('The Itty Bitty Titty Committee')--slogans without meaning, transmissions into space--Honk If You Know Jesus and National Rifle Association bumper emblems nearly effaced by wind-driven sand--the children grubby and crew-cut, the women splayfooted and rubber-thonged--where were the young ladies apparelled for tennis, apparrelled for golfing? Where were the outraged owners of the establishment? The bankers, the people with tie-pins and jeweled letter openers and profoundly lustrous desks of mahogany, the workers of all this machinery of law and circumstance? * * * The truth was * * * that they had enough to keep them occupied. They were busy, complete people. They didn't need to come here in the dark night to seek warmth around the fire of murder or draw close to the ceremonies of a semi-public death."

The angels of the novel are the down and out, the human debris of America. Those who travel cross-country in a Greyhound bus. Those who sell their plasma for lunch money. Those who habitually seek the blurring of reality, whether by alcohol, pills, or heroin. Those who live on a "curbless street lined with wheelless hotrod automobiles on cinderblocks". And those who seek comfort and meaning in the wackier, Satan-dominated efflorescences of Christianity.

As John Steinbeck described the Okies of the 1930s, Denis Johnson describes the flotsam and jetsam of America circa 1980. Five of them are front and center. One is Jamie Mays, who fled Oakland for no certain destination with her two young children after she found, late at night, her husband sneaking out of the nearby trailer home of her best friend, clad only in panties. The other four are the Houstons of Phoenix, Arizona Mrs. Houston, seventy, originally from red-dirt Oklahoma, her second husband in the state pen, living from one Social Security check to the next, dutifully reading the Bible and seeing fortune tellers and trying to use their utterances to make sense of the world; and her three sons -- Bill, Jr., James, and Burris, who usually go their separate ways in one sort or another of alcohol- or drug-induced fog, but who team up under the direction of a criminal mastermind to rob the Central Avenue First State Bank in broad daylight. And that's when their lives really start going down the crapper. (The four Houstons also appear in Johnson's "Tree of Smoke", although there it is about ten years earlier in their lives.)

Most of us would tend to regard the characters who populate ANGELS as sorry losers. The special merit of the novel is to reveal their humanity without glossing over their sorriness . . . and to suggest that perhaps they are closer to the truth.