The most critically acclaimed, and first, of Denis Johnson’s novels, Angels puts Jamie Mays — a runaway wife toting along two kids — and Bill Houston — ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con — on a Greyhound Bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their inescapable destination is a last stop marked by stunning violence and mind-shattering surprise.
Denis Johnson, known for his portraits of America’s dispossessed, sets off literary pyrotechnics on this highway odyssey, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.
A Life of Wonders… 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…
An extraordinary debut by a gifted writer 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…