Name: Angels
Rating: 4.375 (12 reviews)
ISBN: 9780099440833

Denis Johnson

Angels

Chiyeung lau

I never knew I could tear up and sympathize with a murderer, but I did. 

Denis Johnson makes us love these imperfect and awful people and I can't help but open my heart to them. 

One of my favorite quotes from the novel:

"When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all -- cash, booze, and a wife -- he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground."

A Novel

Simon Elliott Stegall

You can do whatever you want to us, he thought; but you can’t pretend like we never lived.

Angels is a book that tests the limits of your compassion. It doesn’t ask you for pity, like Hemingway, or disgust, like Kerouac-- it asks you for just a little love, whatever you can spare, for dispossessed and desperate people who, striving for a mere moment’s peace, slowly digest in the gastric belly of America.

This isn’t really a novel, or at least if you read it that way you’ll be disappointed. It’s poetry, really. There’s no plot to speak of, no form worth mentioning; but each sentence is a little gift to be unwrapped. It’s short, which is to its advantage-- I think another hundred pages would have made it unbearable; just too sad to keep on with. But at 200 pages, this little bible of poverty is just long enough to break your heart.

It’s too bad that everyone knows Johnson’s other book Jesus’ Son, but not Angels, which is vastly better. I recommend this to everyone, but with a warning: it will ask something of you. But even if you’re unwilling to give something back, the prose is wonderful and worth mulling over. Consider the immortal line: All around them men drank alone, staring out of their faces.

Angels

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