- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (6 Mar 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099440830
- ISBN-13: 978-0099440833
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,023,198 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Angels
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Product Description
Review
'A small masterpiece...prose of amazing power and stylishness' Philip Roth
Product Description
Angels is the story of two born losers. Jamie is escaping with two baby girls from a husband who has gone zombie-like on her. Bill is dreaming of making it big in a life of crime so natural to him that any other way would make no sense. They meet on a Greyhound bus, and team up because they have nowhere else to go. So begins a stunning, tragic odyssey through the dark flipside of America - the bars, bus stations, mental wards and prisons of the legions of the lost where Jamie and Bill travel on their inevitable downward spiral though rape, alcohol, drugs and crime to madness and death.
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First Sentence
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. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you've read any Denis Johnson, you'll know the author has an incredible way with language and a particular gift for describing the so-called 'misfits' of American life... addicts, drop-outs, loners, and drifters. This, his first novel, published in the early '80s, is about two characters. Jamie is a single mum with two small kids who ditches her husband and catches a bus across America. She soon meets Bill Houston, an ex-con and alcoholic, and while they fall in love, their alliance throws them onto a troubled path leading to crime, substance abuse, and tragedy. Their story takes place amid bus stations, neon-lit motels, Bible-bashing smalltowns, and lonely highways.
As always with Johnson, there are moments of pure grace in mood and language, as well as twists and turns, and a pretty downbeat (if compelling) ending. 'Angels' is rawer than his later work (Jesus' Son, The Name Of The World--his best books in my opinion) but it is still a gripping and thoroughly original novel. Denis Johnson is one of the most underappreciated American writers of the last two decades, and if you enjoy the Beats, Ray Carver or Hemingway, he is a writer you really should read.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
27 reviews
38 of 40 people found the following review helpful
An extraordinary debut by a gifted writer
7 Sep 1999
Format:Paperback
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.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Powerful literature of the forlorn
5 Feb 2001
Format:Paperback
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.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful
A Life of Wonders...
8 May 2006
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
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.
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